# The Rogue's March (Hornung)/Chapter 14

CHAPTER XIV
OLD NEWGATE
Tom Erichsen was committed for trial about four in the afternoon, by which hour the High Street of Marylebone was thronged by would-be witnesses of his removal in the prison van. But a recent experience, when a posse of police had to accompany the van with drawn staves, had taught the officers a lesson; and their prisoner was spirited away by the side entrance and a hackney coach, while the crowd were watching the gateway for that live man's hearse. The coach started westward down Paddington Street, but was on its course in a couple of minutes, without a solitary follower.
The two police-officers congratulated themselves and each other, but never took an eye off Tom, though they had him handcuffed and held by one arm. Tom, however, paid no heed to them. It was the third of May. The sun was as high as at a winter’s noon; it blazed in the bright shop-windows; it rimmed the cobble-stones ​with tiny bands of gold; for there had been a heavy shower during the day, that had purged the London air, and cleansed and sweetened the whole of London town. Tom looked out wistfully, and inhaled all he could, but it was not to be borne beyond a minute. The beautiful streets, full of happy people, were as a knife twisted round in his heart; he buried his face in his manacled hands, and could look no more.
By half-past four they were at Newgate.
Tom stepped through the sunlight into a forbidding vestibule—a very porch of despair—where a dimly burning lamp avowed eternal gloom. Here the newcomer was entered in a book, relieved of his handcuffs, and forthwith led through humid passages and nail-studded doors into the black heart of this horrible place.
In one corridor a large cell was being swabbed out as they passed. A horrid intuition chilled Tom’s blood.
“Whose cell is that?”
“Nobody’s now.”
“It was Greenacre’s! I had forgotten him; did he—die game?”
“Game? Not he; like a cur.”
Tom set his chattering teeth; but suddenly his eyes blinked: they were out again in the sun, in a yard some fifteen paces long, and half as broad as its length. A parallelogram of brilliant blue sky smiled cruelly overhead, cut on all sides by the high dark walls, and showing from the wet flags as the mouth of a well seen from its base.
“You’re consigned to Chapel Yard,” said Tom’s guide, “and this is it. I’m just looking for a wardsman, and then I’m done with ’ee. Ah, here he comes!”
A great, gross being, with an irregular walk and a face ​of solidified beer, tacked towards them as the turnkey spoke.
“Now, wot’s all this?” inquired a voice to scale. “Wot for are you a-bringin’ noo boys here for? Recepshun ward’s the place for them; they’ve got no business ‘ere.”
“Well, them’s the orders, and this is a special case. It’s Erichsen!”
The wardsman opened his half-shut eyes, and blinked incredulity.
“Gerrout!” said he. “That kid? Pitch us another.”
“It’s right,” said the turnkey. “Committed this afternoon.”
“Well, I’m darned: you wouldn’t think it of ’im, now would yer?” asked the fuddled connoisseur, half-sobered by surprise. A slow, dim admiration glimmered in the clouded face like a rush-light in a yellow fog. “Why, Master Erichsen,” he continued, “I’m proud to have ye in my ward. We know all about you ’ere, and this is a proud day for Number Twelve. I’ll do my best to make ye at home.”
“An’ it all rests with he,” whispered the turnkey, taking his leave. “Pay you his dues, and you’ll do well.”
Tom had already glanced down the yard, and noted two prisoners playing pitch-and-toss at the far end; another sitting on a wet flag, back to wall, knees up, chin down, an abject picture; and a third, in tatters, drawing near, open-mouthed. He now turned abruptly to the wardsman.
“What’s this about dues?”
“On’y a little weekly trifle for the pore wardsman; nothing to hurt, Master Erichsen—”
“I double it if I don’t hear that name again!”
The man stared. “You are a noo boy, no error!” ​cried he. “It’s very clear you don’t know Noogit, let alone Chapel Yard, where all the best men comes to, like yourself. Why, they’ll give you the ’artiest welcome ever you ’ad; you’ve done it big, sir, that you ’ave; and you that young! Come away to Number Ten, I’ll introduce ye, and ye’ll see. Number Ten’s where they’ve all got to, as you can ’ear for yourself.” Along the yard were, indeed, three open doors, and through the farthest of these came oaths and laughter, snatches of song, the ring of money and the rattle of dice.
Tom clutched the wardsman’s sleeve.
“Didn’t you understand? I don’t want them to know who I am—I double your dues if they don’t.”
“But know they must; they’ll soon find it out.”
“It’s half-a-crown a day until they do! Here’s the first shilling, and the rest to-night.”
“Well, as you like. It’ll be ’alf-a-crown a week for use of knives, forks, kittles an’ saucep’ns.”
“Here it is.”
“Thank’ee, master. I never forgit the blokes wot pays in advance. I sha’n’t forgit Thomas Erichsen!”
Tom was blazing. The man with the open mouth was within three yards of them. He rolled his light-blue eyes, and laughed high up in his head as Tom pointed to him in his rage.
“Oh, ’e don’t count,” said the wardsman. “’E’s stark starin’ mad.”
“What! you keep madmen here as well?”
“All sorts—mad—bad—glad an’ sad. See that poor devil against the wall! Now come and I’ll show you Number Twelve.”
The ward was a fair-sized room, with mats hung round the walls, for the prisoners’ beds at night. One such ​mat was in use thus early, whereon a human lump lay snorting in a drunken sleep beneath a couple of rugs; otherwise the ward was empty. Tom noticed the vestiges of a gaming-board chalked upon the deal table, and at the other end a pile of newspapers, in which, no doubt, his fortunes had been daily followed. After Clerkenwell, where the separate system even then obtained, Newgate was a revelation, or rather a succession of them, with the most amazing yet to come.
The wardsman opened a cupboard, invited Tom to have a glass of beer, and drank three glasses with him. The whole place stank of beer; its stains were on everything; there seemed to be an unlimited supply. Tom took his glass, and soon saw that he was being treated with a view to business. He was offered a flock-bed, instead of the mat, at an extra half-crown a week. This he declined; whereupon the wardsman, now fast returning to intoxication, offered to draw up his brief for a pound. He professed an unrivalled experience; was the recognised brief-drawer for the yard, under sanction of the governor himself; and had drawn up twenty-three last sessions, of which more than half led to acquittals. The boys reckoned him worth a waggon-load of lawyers any day in the week; he would do his very best for a pound.
Tom looked at the great sot sprawling over the table, and shook his head with a civil word.
“Fifteen bob, then.”
“Thank you, no.”
“Well, I don’t want to be ’ard on a gent on trial for his life. Say ’alf a couter!”
“No, thanks; the fact is—”
“Oh, if you’re that ’ard up, let’s make it five and be done with it.”
​Five shillings happened to be his regulation price.
“No,” said Tom. “The fact is a solicitor is engaging counsel—”
“Then why the hell couldn’t you say so at first?” roared the other, in a drunken fury. “But lemme tell you five couters wouldn’t draw the brief as’d save your neck; no, nor yet five ’underd; nor all the lousy lawyers in the country. An’ I’ll trouble you for twopence for that glass o’ beer!”
Tom threw the coppers on the table and went out, followed by his own name hurled after him in loud derision; but the wardsman’s articulation was no longer intelligible, and the brute himself stopped where he was, and lay down upon the one bed in the room, which was his own.
This man was himself a prisoner, under sentence of two years for criminal conspiracy. Newgate contained no wretch more mercenary or more debauched. Yet the regulations of the time set such a one in authority, countenanced his iniquitous emoluments, and allowed him to spend them upon unlimited beer!
The madman was still wandering in the yard, crooning to himself in a high falsetto. His blue eye, happy and vacant as the clear evening sky, fixed Tom as he emerged, and set him envying the man who came to Newgate but left his wits outside. The pitch-and-toss pair had disappeared; in Number Ten the sounds of revelry were louder and more continuous than before; but that dejected figure, with the bent knees and the fallen chin, still sat outside in the damp. Tom’s compassion was aroused. He approached, and found a stripling with a white, damp skin, bony wrists, and fleshless knees.
​“You oughtn’t to be sitting out here,” said Tom. “Why not get up and go inside?”
“Why should I?” rejoined the youth, raising eyes deep-sunken in a mass of skin and bone.
“Because if you don’t you may catch your death.”
“All the better! That’s my lay. I’m cold an’ wet, but it’s no use goin’ in there; there ain’t no fire when you do. I want to go straight to hell.”
Tom shuddered, but stooped down.
“Come, come,” said he; “I’ll give you an arm.”
“You’re a rum cove,” replied the other, looking carelessly up; “but I bet you ain’t kissed this ’ere clink afore, or you wouldn’t say that! Nice spot, ain’t it? But this is a sight better than the Middle Yard. I’ve bin ’ere afore, you see; this makes the fourth time; thank Gawd it’ll be the larst!”
He suffered Tom to help him to his feet, the shrunken shadow of a man, dressed, however, very respectably, in black clothes eloquently loose. On Tom’s arm he was promptly seized with a fit of coughing that sounded as if his bag of bones must split asunder; but he mastered it, wiped his hollow eyes with prominent knuckles, and said: “That’s better! One or two more like that’ll do my business.” Tom’s gorge rose to hear him; yet he understood the feeling. It had come to himself in the soaking, inhospitable fields; only now, with the shadow of death lengthening hourly towards him, he knew how little he had ever wished to die.
“You ought to be in the infirmary,” he said; “it’s a scandal to find you here.”
“No it ain’t!” coughed the youth. “It’s my own doings; Macmurdo ain’t to blame. I on’y come in larst night, and dodged ’im on ’is round this mornin’, ’cause I ​wanted to be with my old pals; and roast me if they ’aven’t served me out by winnin’ my last chinker!”
Tom wanted to lend him a little. The other refused, but with a gleaming eye. Presently he said he felt stronger, and would take Tom’s advice. So he quitted his arm and went into Number Ten.
Deterred by the din of oaths and laughter, Tom lingered without; but curiosity at length conquered aversion, and he entered a den of gamblers who never looked at him, so intent were they upon their petty play. Crowded round the table, upon which lighted candles had now been stuck in their own grease, were some thirty men of every age and type, save that the latter was in most cases one of obvious criminality. Lust of gain was on every face, the scum of every soul had risen to the surface. And in the forefront facing Tom, lean elbows like tent-poles in their sleeves, wet white hands, and the face of the consumptive like a painted corpse. A little heap of silver lay before him on the board; each minute left it less; and this was he who had declared to Tom that his friends had won his last coin.
Instinctively Tom’s hand felt in the pocket in which he had carried his pound of silver loose. Not a sixpence remained.
His fist doubled, but relaxed at sight of the hectic pickpocket and his pale, perspiring hands; the hair clung rank to his low forehead; the eyeballs burnt in their receding sockets; and even as Tom watched, his own last sixpence was lost before his eyes.
“So it ain’t done you that much good, arter all,” said the man who won it.
“Stop a bit!” cried the pickpocket. “I forked the ​flat’s wipe as well. I’ll put it on for a brown!” And he spat blood on it for luck.
“My handkerchief,” said Tom, calmly, from the rear.
“Is that the flat?”
“That’s him,” said the pickpocket, laughing hysterically; but Tom’s grudge was not against the thief.
“Shame on you,” said he, “to rook that dying man and bring him to this! Are you Englishmen or what? You ought to be nursing him among you, instead of exciting him to his death.”
A roar of laughter greeted these words; at an instructive interval, however; and eight or ten eyes looked down.
“A proper flat!” cried one.
“Parson come to rake in the churchyard deserter!”
“The Ordinary’ll give him a job. What the blazes did he do to get here?”
Suggestions followed, beast capping beast with bestial humour. Tom’s eyes, filled with pity, never travelled from the pickpocket’s poor face. Suddenly a new voice chimed in, “You’re all wrong, boys; it’s Erichsen himself!”—
The handkerchief was marked, and one had read the name.
The effect of its announcement was something incredible: all rose, save the pickpocket, who was unable. A hushed awe fell, but it was the awe inspired by sudden contact with a master hand. Tom shrank before their vile, admiring looks; they admired him all the more; the tainted air hummed with compliments, condolences, criticisms and cross-questions. One or two said he deserved to die for a clumsy workman. A thick-set young fellow, with a sleek face and his hair in his ​eyes, elbowed his way to the front and wanted to shake hands because they were in the same boat.
“Sling us your mauley, old cock!” cried he.
Tom declined the honour.
“Then double them, you cuckoo!”
Tom declined again; a ring was formed, but he refused to enter it, and turned a deaf ear to their taunts. It was notable, however, that only the tongues interfered with him; not a single hand; and the shrewder men saw it was not cowardice. Tom’s sad eyes would not leave the dying thief, who was now sprawling across the table, with his death’s head on one skinny arm, fast asleep.
To keep an eye on this poor fellow, Tom remained in Number Ten Ward, arranging the matter with the new wardsman, who seemed a well-disposed, weak vessel. At supper-time there came the turnkey who had conducted him to the yard, to whisper that a hot meal had been sent in from outside by his friends, and he might have it in the Bread Room if he liked to make it worth a man’s while. “Friends!” thought Tom. “It is my one true friend, who doesn’t disbelieve in me, and whose very name I don’t know.”
He noted the impression that he was one who could pay for things, and its effect upon the small official fry. But he said he would take his supper where he was. When it came he put it before the sleeping consumptive, gently woke him, saw him finish every morsel, and himself supped on gruel from a pail. He was directly annoyed no more that evening, but his challenger talked at him after locking-up time, when they were all upon their mats. And this was in other ways an odious interval.
Tom had never been too particular among his own associates in the little matter of his conversation. At ​school, at college, in the stable-yard at home, his language had been more than free at times, and never studiously considered. This is stated as a fact, not a merit. Tom was not without refinement, but his spiritual armour was full of joints, or this his ruin had never come about. To-night, however, he first tossed on his mat—then clenched his fists and sprang up in the dark—but lay down again, recollecting his own footing in that foul place—and finally dug his thumbs in his ears and remained supine and ashamed. Hitherto he had held that he knew everything and could stand much. He altered his opinion in Number Ten Ward of the Chapel Yard at Newgate.
At last they tired of their talk and began to snore. Tom was himself dropping off when the poor fellow at his side woke up groaning.
“The sweat!—the sweat!” he whimpered. “Now I’ll have to lie in it, cold, till morning.”
“That you won’t,” said Tom, cheerily. He bad taken the next mat to the pickpocket’s from no unmixed sense of duty. The tragedy of this poor ebbing life had come with incredibly grateful effect between his own mind and his own woes. Besides, there was a fellow-feeling: they were both unquestionably cast for death; the only question was as to which would go first. So Tom was glad to have this comrade in hopeless case; he was thankful for the very glow it gave him to do what he could.
He stripped his companion, he stripped himself, and, by a moon-ray breaking obliquely through grimy glass and iron bars, he got the sufferer into his own dry things. Tom then lay down, half-naked, between the rugs supplied with each mat; having first tucked up his charge with all the care and gentleness he could command. ​And the pickpocket said hardly a word; but in the succeeding stillness Tom felt the feeble clasp of a clammy hand; and that was all.
He went to sleep with tears in his eyes, and dreamt of Claire at Winwood, on a bluff October day, with the wind in her ringlets, its glow on her cheek, but her little hand so white and innocent that he wasted all the time in longing to take it in his, but not daring for very shame. And from this sweet delusion he woke with a howl of pain. One had tied a cord to his toe, and was pulling it so hard that his very body had budged some inches. He had the cord between his fingers next instant, when it was at once let go at the other end.
But Tom was implacable when his blood was up, and it was boiling now. Trembling with rage, he found and struck a lucifer, and espied a rug shaking across the floor. He sprang up and dealt the carcase beneath as heavy a kick as naked foot could give; then snatched off the rug and caught one glimpse, as the match burnt his fingers, of the sleek, low, infuriate face of his fellow-prisoner on a capital charge.
“You little beast!” said Tom. “Yes, I’ll fight you now!”
The fellow had him by the legs that instant, and head over heels they went, upon men lying so close together they trod upon two at once. These started up, screaming blasphemies, while on the pair went struggling, the brute’s teeth in Tom’s leg, and Tom’s thumbs at his windpipe: until the place was in an uproar, lights struck, and the belligerents at last torn asunder.
Every man was awake and cursing—some in a passion, some with glee.
“Bedad, boys,” yelled the wildest voice of all, “it’s ​the Kilkhinny cats; let ’em chaw each other up, for the love av God!”
“That’s it. A ring—a ring!”
“They’ll save Jack Ketch his trouble.”
“A bonny brace!”
And that they were—Tom stripped to the waist, his nankeen trousers flecked with blood—his enemy foaming at the mouth, and struggling still in half-a-dozen brawny hands. Dips were lighted, the ring formed. Silence was then called, and something like it obtained, save for the innocent laughter of the lunatic in his corner, and the plaintive voice of the consumptive shut out on his mat.
“Let me see,” it quavered. “That’s no flat. That’s the best man above earth. Lend a mauley, old pals, and let a beggar see!”
So they dragged him out upon his mat, and made room for it and him, because he was too weak to rise. Ant in what ensued, his recumbent figure was the one that ought to have been watched, with eyeballs starting from their sunken sockets, and livid lips that tried so hard to cheer—when Tom spilt his man in the first round—and that failed so pitiably. But only Tom kept an eye on him; and so had it blacked through dropping his hands and darting to the pickpocket, who had fallen forward with the blood gushing from his mouth.
Tom got him in his arms, and pillowed the deathly head upon his naked chest. “Stand aside, lads,” cried. “The excitement—he’s going! Let the wardsman fetch help of some kind.”
The wardsman had been a weakly protesting part all that had happened; he was glad to get away.
The shrieking pandemonium was now silent as ​church. The worst man there looked on in awe at Tom with his closing eye and tender hands, and the gasping white face upon his bosom. Unheeded in his corner, the lunatic still chuckled at intervals; there was but one other sound. ...
A brief rally preceded the end; and a thing happened that might have chilled the coldest heart. Five nerveless white fingers, all skin and knuckles, were seen to steal into the pocket of him in whose arms the poor soul lay dying; and the member, but not the mind, following its vile trade to the end, so he died in the unconscious act.
The grey May morning came creeping through the prison bars. One in the background broke down in sudden sobs. The bell of St. Sepulchre’s tolled four; and as Tom laid his burden gently down, he awoke to his own bitter case, and longed for even that hideous night to begin again.