Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet by Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

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"But where did you get the money? You have not surely been spending your
own savings on me?"

"I canna say that I wadna ha' so dune, in case o' need. But the men in town
just subscribit; puir honest fellows."

"What! is my folly to be the cause of robbing them of their slender
earnings? Never, Mackaye! Besides, they cannot have subscribed enough to
pay the barrister whom you just mentioned. Tell me the whole truth, or,
positively, I will plead my cause myself."

"Aweel, then, there was a bit bank-note or twa cam' to hand--I canna say
whaur fra'. But they that sent it direckit it to be expendit in the defence
o' the sax prisoners--whereof ye make ane."

Again a world of fruitless conjecture. It must be the same unknown friend
who had paid my debt to my cousin--Lillian?

* * * * *

And so the day was come. I am not going to make a long picturesque
description of my trial--trials have become lately quite hackneyed
subjects, stock properties for the fiction-mongers--neither, indeed,
could I do so, if I would. I recollect nothing of that day, but
fragments--flashes of waking existence, scattered up and down in what
seemed to me a whole life of heavy, confused, painful dreams, with the
glare of all those faces concentrated on me--those countless eyes which
I could not, could not meet--stony, careless, unsympathizing--not even
angry--only curious. If they had but frowned on me, insulted me, gnashed
their teeth on me, I could have glared back defiance; as it was, I stood
cowed and stupified, a craven by the side of cravens.

Let me see--what can I recollect? Those faces--faces--everywhere faces--a
faint, sickly smell of flowers--a perpetual whispering and rustling of
dresses--and all through it, the voice of some one talking, talking--I
seldom knew what, or whether it was counsel, witness, judge, or prisoner,
that was speaking. I was like one asleep at a foolish lecture, who hears in
dreams, and only wakes when the prosing stops. Was it not prosing? What
was it to me what they said? They could not understand me--my motives--my
excuses; the whole pleading, on my side as well as the crown's, seemed one
huge fallacy--beside the matter altogether--never touching the real point
at issue, the eternal moral equity of my deeds or misdeeds. I had no doubt
that it would all be conducted quite properly, and fairly, and according to
the forms of law; but what was law to me--I wanted justice. And so I let
them go on their own way, conscious of but one thought--was Lillian in the
court?

I dared not look and see. I dared not lift up my eyes toward the gaudy
rows of ladies who had crowded to the "interesting trial of the D * * * *
rioters." The torture of anxiety was less than that of certainty might be,
and I kept my eyes down, and wondered how on earth the attorneys had found
in so simple a case enough to stuff those great blue bags.

When, however, anything did seem likely to touch on a reality, I woke up
forthwith, in spite of myself. I recollect well, for instance, a squabble
about challenging the jurymen; and my counsel's voice of pious indignation,
as he asked, "Do you call these agricultural gentlemen, and farmers,
however excellent and respectable--on which point Heaven forbid that I,
&c., &c.--the prisoner's 'pares,' peers, equals, or likes? What single
interest, opinion, or motive, have they in common, but the universal one
of self-interest, which, in this case, happens to pull in exactly opposite
directions? Your Lordship has often animadverted fully and boldly on the
practice of allowing a bench of squires to sit in judgment on a poacher;
surely it is quite as unjust that agricultural rioters should be tried by a
jury of the very class against whom they are accused of rebelling."

"Perhaps my learned brother would like a jury of rioters?" suggested some
Queen's counsel.

"Upon my word, then, it would be much the fairer plan."

I wondered whether he would have dared to say as much in the street
outside--and relapsed into indifference. I believe there was some long
delay, and wrangling about law-quibbles, which seemed likely at one time to
quash the whole prosecution, but I was rather glad than sorry to find
that it had been overruled. It was all a play, a game of bowls--the
bowls happening to be human heads--got up between the lawyers, for the
edification of society; and it would have been a pity not to play it out,
according to the rules and regulations thereof.

As for the evidence, its tenor may be easily supposed from my story.
There were those who could swear to my language at the camp. I was seen
accompanying the mob to the farm, and haranguing them. The noise was too
great for the witnesses to hear all I said, but they were certain I talked
about the sacred name of liberty. The farmer's wife had seen me run round
to the stacks when they were fired--whether just before or just after, she
never mentioned. She had seen me running up and down in front of the house,
talking loudly, and gesticulating violently; she saw me, too, struggling
with another rioter for her husband's desk;--and the rest of the witnesses,
some of whom I am certain I had seen, busy plundering, though they were
ready to swear that they had been merely accidental passers-by, seemed
to think that they proved their own innocence, and testified their pious
indignation, by avoiding carefully any fact which could excuse me. But,
somehow, my counsel thought differently; and cross-examined, and bullied,
and tormented, and misstated--as he was bound to do; and so one witness
after another, clumsy and cowardly enough already, was driven by his
engines of torture, as if by a pitiless spell, to deny half that he had
deposed truly, and confess a great deal that was utterly false--till
confusion became worse confounded, and there seemed no truth anywhere,
and no falsehood either, and "naught was everything, and everything was
naught;" till I began to have doubts whether the riot had ever occurred
at all--and, indeed, doubts of my own identity also, when I had heard the
counsel for the crown impute to me personally, as in duty bound, every
seditious atrocity which, had been committed either in England or France
since 1793. To him, certainly, I did listen tolerably; it was "as good as a
play." Atheism, blasphemy, vitriol-throwing, and community of women, were
among my lighter offences--for had I not actually been engaged in a plot
for the destruction of property? How did the court know that I had not
spent the night before the riot, as "the doctor" and his friends did before
the riots of 1839, in drawing lots for the estates of the surrounding
gentlemen, with my deluded dupes and victims?--for of course I, and not
want of work, had deluded them into rioting; at least, they never would
have known that they were starving, if I had not stirred up their evil
passions by daring to inform them of that otherwise impalpable fact. I, the
only Chartist there? Might there not have been dozens of them?--emissaries
from London, dressed up as starving labourers, and rheumatic old women?
There were actually traces of a plan for seizing all the ladies in the
country, and setting up a seraglio of them in D * * * * Cathedral. How did
the court know that there was not one?

Ay, how indeed? and how did I know either? I really began to question
whether the man might not be right after all. The whole theory seemed
so horribly coherent--possible, natural. I might have done it, under
possession of the devil, and forgotten it in excitement--I might--perhaps
I did. And if there, why not elsewhere? Perhaps I had helped Jourdan
Coupe-tête at Lyons, and been king of the Munster Anabaptists--why not?
What matter? When would this eternity of wigs, and bonnets, and glaring
windows, and ear-grinding prate and jargon, as of a diabolic universe of
street organs, end--end--end--and I get quietly hanged, and done with it
all for ever?

Oh, the horrible length of that day! It seemed to me as if I had been
always on my trial, ever since I was born. I wondered at times how
many years ago it had all begun. I felt what a far stronger and more
single-hearted patriot than I, poor Somerville, says of himself under the
torture of the sergeant's cat, in a passage, whose horrible simplicity and
unconscious pathos have haunted me ever since I read it; how, when only
fifty out of his hundred lashes had fallen on the bleeding back, "_The time
since they began was like a long period of life: I felt as if I had lived
all the time of my real life in torture, and, that the days when existence
had a pleasure, in it were a dream long, long gone by._"

The reader may begin to suspect that I was fast going mad; and I believe I
was. If he has followed my story with a human heart, he may excuse me of
any extreme weakness, if I did at moments totter on the verge of that
abyss.

What saved me, I believe now, was the keen, bright look of love and
confidence which flashed on me from Crossthwaite's glittering eyes, when he
was called forward as a witness to my character. He spoke out like a man,
I hear, that day. But the counsel for the crown tried to silence him
triumphantly, by calling on him to confess himself a Chartist; as if a man
must needs be a liar and a villain because he holds certain opinions about
the franchise! However that was, I heard, the general opinion of the court.
And then Crossthwaite lost his temper and called the Queen's counsel a
hired bully, and so went down; having done, as I was told afterwards, no
good to me.

And then there followed a passage of tongue fence between Mackaye and some
barrister, and great laughter at the barrister's expense; and then. I heard
the old man's voice rise thin and clear:

"Let him that is without sin amang ye, cast the first stane!"

And as he went down he looked at me--a look full of despair. I never had
had a ray of hope from the beginning; but now I began to think whether men
suffered much when they were hung, and whether one woke at once into the
next life, or had to wait till the body had returned to the dust, and watch
the ugly process of one's own decay. I was not afraid of death--I never
experienced that sensation. I am not physically brave. I am as thoroughly
afraid of pain as any child can be; but that next world has never offered
any prospect to me, save boundless food for my insatiable curiosity.

* * * * *

But at that moment my attorney thrust into my hand a little dirty scrap of
paper. "Do you know this man?" I read it.

"SIR,--I wull tell all truthe. Mr. Locke is a murdered man if he be hanged.
Lev me spek out, for love of the Lord.

"J. DAVIS."

No. I never had heard of him; and I let the paper fall.

A murdered man? I had known that all along. Had not the Queen's counsel
been trying all day to murder me, as was their duty, seeing that they got
their living thereby?

A few moments after, a labouring man was in the witness-box; and to my
astonishment, telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth.

I will not trouble the reader with his details, for they were simply
and exactly what I have already stated. He was badgered, bullied,
cross-examined, but nothing could shake him. With that dogged honesty, and
laconic dignity, which is the good side of the English peasant's character,
he stood manfully to his assertion--that I had done everything that words
or actions could do to prevent violence, even to the danger of my own
personal safety. He swore to the words which I used when trying to wrest
the desk from the man who had stolen it; and when the Queen's counsel asked
him, tauntingly, who had set him on bringing his new story there at the
eleventh hour, he answered, equally to the astonishment of his questioner,
and of me,

"Muster Locke, hisself."

"What! the prisoner?" almost screamed the counsellor, who fancied, I
suppose, that he had stumbled on a confession of unblushing bribery.

"Yes, he; he there. As he went up over hill to meeting he met my two boys
a shep-minding; and, because the cutter was froze, he stop and turn the
handle for 'em for a matter of ten minutes; and I was coming up over field,
and says I, I'll hear what that chap's got to say--there can't be no harm
in going up arter the likes of he; for, says I to myself, a man can't have
got any great wickedness a plotting in he's head, when he'll stop a ten
minutes to help two boys as he never sot eyes on afore in his life; and I
think their honours'll say the same."

Whether my reader will agree or not with the worthy fellow, my counsel, I
need not say, did, and made full use of his hint. All the previous evidence
was now discovered to have corroborated the last witness, except where
it had been notoriously overthrown. I was extolled as a miracle of calm
benevolence; and black became grey, and grey became spotless white, and the
whole feeling of the court seemed changed in my favour; till the little
attorney popped up his head and whispered to me:

"By George! that last witness has saved your life."

To which I answered, "Very well"--and turned stupidly back upon that
nightmare thought--was Lillian in the court?

* * * * *

At last, a voice, the judge's I believe, for it was grave, gentle, almost
compassionate, asked us one by one whether we had anything to say in our
own defence. I recollect an indistinct murmur from one after another of the
poor semi-brutes on my left; and then my attorney looking up to me, made
me aware that I was expected to speak. On the moment, somehow, my whole
courage returned to me. I felt that I must unburden my heart, now or never.
With a sudden effort I roused myself, and looking fixedly and proudly at
the reverend face opposite, began:

"The utmost offence which has been proved against me is a few bold words,
producing consequences as unexpected as illogical. If the stupid ferocity
with which my words were misunderstood, as by a horde of savages rather
than Englishmen;--if the moral and physical condition of these prisoners at
my side;--of those witnesses who have borne testimony against me, miserable
white slaves, miscalled free labourers;--ay, if a single walk through the
farms and cottages on which this mischief was bred, affords no excuse for
one indignant sentence--"

There she was! There she had been all the time--right opposite to me, close
to the judge--cold, bright, curious--smiling! And as our eyes met, she
turned away, and whispered gaily something to a young man who sat beside
her.

Every drop of blood in my body rushed into my forehead; the court, the
windows, and the faces, whirled round and round, and I fell senseless on
the floor of the dock.

* * * * *

I next recollect some room or other in the gaol, Mackaye with both my hands
in his; and the rough kindly voice of the gaoler congratulating me on
having "only got three years."

"But you didn't show half a good pluck," said some one. "There's two on 'em
transported, took it as bold as brass, and thanked the judge for getting
'em out 'o this starving place 'free gracious for nothing," says they."

"Ah!" quoth the little attorney, rubbing his hands, "you should have seen
* * * * and * * * * after the row in '42! They were the boys for the Bull
Ring! Gave a barrister as good as he brought, eh, Mr. Mackaye? My small
services, you remember, were of no use, really no use at all--quite ashamed
to send in my little account. Managed the case themselves, like two
patriotic parties as they were, with a degree of forensic acuteness,
inspired by the consciousness of a noble cause--Ahem! You remember, friend
M.? Grand triumphs those, eh?"

"Ay," said Sandy, "I mind them unco weel--they cost me a' my few savings,
mair by token; an' mony a braw fallow paid for ither folks' sins that tide.
But my puir laddie here's no made o' that stuff. He's ower thin-skinned for
a patriot."

"Ah, well--this little taste of British justice will thicken his hide for
him, eh?" And the attorney chuckled and winked. "He'll come out again as
tough as a bull dog, and as surly too. Eh, Mr. Mackaye?--eh?"

"'Deed, then, I'm unco sair afeard that your opeenion is no a'thegither
that improbable," answered Sandy with a drawl of unusual solemnity.

CHAPTER XXX.

PRISON THOUGHTS.

I was alone in my cell.

Three years' imprisonment! Thirty-six months!--one thousand and ninety-five
days--and twenty-four whole hours in each of them! Well--I should sleep
half the time: one-third at least. Perhaps I should not be able to sleep!
To lie awake, and think--there! the thought was horrible--it was all
horrible. To have three whole years cut out of my life, instead of having
before me, as I had always as yet had, a mysterious Eldorado of new schemes
and hopes, possible developments, possible triumphs, possible bliss--to
have nothing, nothing before me but blank and stagnation, dead loss and
waste: and then to go out again, and start once more where I had left off
yesterday!

It should not be! I would not lose these years! I would show myself a man;
they should feel my strength just when they fancied they had crushed me
utterly! They might bury me, but I should rise again!--I should rise again
more glorious, perhaps to be henceforth immortal, and live upon the lips
of men. I would educate myself; I would read--what would I not read? These
three years should be a time of sacred retirement and contemplation, as of
Thebaid Anchorite, or Mahomet in his Arabian cave. I would write pamphlets
that should thunder through the land, and make tyrants tremble on their
thrones! All England--at least all crushed and suffering hearts--should
break forth at my fiery words into one roar of indignant sympathy. No--I
would write a poem; I would concentrate all my experience, my aspirations,
all the hopes, and wrongs, and sorrows of the poor, into one garland of
thorns--one immortal epic of suffering. What should I call it? And I set to
work deliberately--such a thing is man--to think of a title.

I looked up, and my eye caught the close bars of the little window;
and then came over me, for the first time, the full meaning of that
word--Prison; that word which the rich use so lightly, knowing well that
there is no chance, in these days, of there ever finding themselves in one;
for the higher classes never break the laws--seeing that they have made
them to fit themselves. Ay, I was in prison. I could not go out or come in
at will. I was watched, commanded at every turn. I was a brute animal, a
puppet, a doll, that children put away in a cupboard, and there it lies.
And yet my whole soul was as wide, fierce, roving, struggling as ever.
Horrible contradiction! The dreadful sense of helplessness, the crushing
weight of necessity, seemed to choke me. The smooth white walls, the
smooth white ceiling, seemed squeezing in closer and closer on me, and yet
dilating into vast inane infinities, just as the merest knot of mould
will transform itself, as one watches it, and nothing else, into enormous
cliffs, long slopes of moor, and spurs of mountain-range. Oh, those smooth
white walls and ceilings! If there had but been a print--a stain of dirt--a
cobweb, to fleck their unbroken ghastliness! They stared at me, like grim,
impassive, featureless formless fiends; all the more dreadful for their
sleek, hypocritic cleanliness--purity as of a saint-inquisitor watching
with spotless conscience the victim on the rack. They choked me--I gasped
for breath, stretched out my arms, rolled shrieking on the floor--the
narrow chequered glimpse of free blue sky, seen through the window, seemed
to fade dimmer and dimmer, farther and farther off. I sprang up, as if to
follow it--rushed to the bars, shook and wrenched at them with my thin,
puny arms--and stood spell-bound, as I caught sight of the cathedral
towers, standing out in grand repose against the horizontal fiery bars of
sunset, like great angels at the gates of Paradise, watching in stately
sorrow all the wailing and the wrong below. And beneath, beneath--the
well-known roofs--Lillian's home, and all its proud and happy memories! It
was but a corner of a gable, a scrap of garden, that I could see beyond
intervening roofs and trees--but could I mistake them? There was the very
cedar-tree; I knew its dark pyramid but too well! There I had walked by
her; there, just behind that envious group of chestnuts, she was now. The
light was fading; it must be six o'clock; she must be in her room now,
dressing herself for dinner, looking so beautiful! And as I gazed, and
gazed, all the intervening objects became transparent and vanished before
the intensity of my imagination. Were my poems in her room still? Perhaps
she had thrown them away--the condemned rioter's poems! Was she thinking of
me? Yes--with horror and contempt. Well, at least she was thinking of me.
And she would understand me at last--she must. Some day she would know
all I had borne for love of her--the depth, the might, the purity of my
adoration. She would see the world honouring me, in the day of my triumph,
when I was appreciated at last; when I stood before the eyes of admiring
men, a people's singer, a king of human spirits, great with the rank which
genius gives, then she would find out what a man had loved her: then she
would know the honour, the privilege of a poet's worship.

--But that trial scene.

Ay--that trial scene. That cold unmoved smile!--when she knew me, must have
known me, not to be the wretch which those hired slanderers had called me.
If she had cared for me--if she had a woman's heart in her at all, any
pity, any justice, would she not have spoken? Would she not have called on
others to speak, and clear me of the calumny? Nonsense! Impossible! She--so
frail, tender, retiring--how could she speak? How did I know that she had
not felt for me? It was woman's nature--duty, to conceal her feelings;
perhaps that after all was the true explanation of that smile. Perhaps,
too, she might have spoken--might be even now pleading for me in secret;
not that I wished to be pardoned--not I--but it would be so delicious to
have her, her, pleading for me! Perhaps--perhaps I might hear of her--from
her! Surely she could not leave me here so close, without some token! And I
actually listened, I know not how long, expecting the door to open, and a
message to arrive; till, with my eyes riveted on that bit of gable, and my
ears listening behind me like a hare's in her form, to catch every sound in
the ward outside, I fell fast asleep, and forgot all in the heavy dreamless
torpor of utter mental and bodily exhaustion.

I was awakened by the opening of my cell door and the appearance of the
turnkey.

"Well, young man, all right again? You've had a long nap; and no wonder,
you've had a hard time of it lately; and a good lesson, to you, too."

"How long have I slept? I do not recollect going to bed. And how came I to
lie down without undressing?"

"I found you, at lock-up hours, asleep there kneeling on the chair, with
your head on the window-sill; and a mercy you hadn't tumbled off and broke
your back. Now, look here.--You seems a civil sort of chap; and civil gets
as civil gives with me. Only don't you talk no politics. They ain't no good
to nobody, except the big 'uns, wot gets their living thereby; and I should
think you'd had dose enough on 'em to last for a month of Sundays. So just
get yourself tidy, there's a lad, and come along with me to chapel."

I obeyed him, in that and other things; and I never received from him, or,
indeed, from any one else there, aught but kindness. I have no complaint to
make--but prison is prison. As for talking politics, I never, during those
three years, exchanged as many sentences with any of my fellow-prisoners.
What had I to say to them? Poachers and petty thieves--the scum of misery,
ignorance, and rascality throughout the country. If my heart yearned toward
them at times, it was generally shut close by the exclusive pride of
superior intellect and knowledge. I considered it, as it was, a degradation
to be classed with such; never asking myself how far I had brought that
degradation on myself; and I loved to show my sense of injustice by
walking, moody and silent, up and down a lonely corner of the yard; and at
last contrived, under the plea of ill health (and, truly, I never was ten
minutes without coughing), to confine myself entirely to my cell, and
escape altogether the company of a class whom I despised, almost hated, as
my betrayers, before whom I had cast away my pearls--questionable though
they were according to Mackaye. Oh! there is in the intellectual
workman's heart, as in all others, the root of Pharisaism--the lust after
self-glorifying superiority, on the ground of "genius." We too are men;
frail, selfish, proud as others. The days are past, thank God, when the
"gentlemen button-makers," used to insist on a separate tap-room from the
mere "button-makers," on the ground of earning a few more shillings per
week. But we are not yet thorough democrats, my brothers; we do not yet
utterly believe our own loud doctrine of equality; nor shall we till--But I
must not anticipate the stages of my own experience.