Complete works of hall c.., p.172
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 172
“This bed is dry and sound,” said Michael Sunlocks, “and you shall not take it.”
“Away with it,” shouted the warder to Jason, who had seemed to hesitate.
“It is good and wholesome, let him keep it,” said Jason.
“Go on with your work,” cried the warder, and the lock of his musket clicked.
“Civilized men give straw to their dogs to lie on,” said Michael Sunlocks.
“It depends what dogs they are,” sneered the warder.
“If you take our beds, this place will be worse than an empty kennel,” said Michael Sunlocks.
“Better that than the mange,” said the warder. “Get along, I tell you,” he cried again, handling his musket and turning to Jason.
Then, with a glance of loathing, Jason picked up the bed in his fingers, that itched to pick up the warder by the throat, and swept out of the place.
“Slave!” cried Michael Sunlocks after him. “Pitiful, miserable, little-hearted slave!”
Jason heard the hot words that pursued him, and his face grew as red as his hair, and his head dropped into his breast. He finished his task in less than half an hour more, working like a demented man at piling up the dirty mattresses, into a vast heap, and setting light to the damp straw. And while the huge bonfire burned, and he poked long poles into it to give it air to blaze by, he made excuse of the great heat to strip of the long rough overcoat that had been given him to wear through the hard months of the winter. By this time the warder had fallen back from the scorching flames, and Jason, watching his chance, stole away under cover of deep whorls of smoke, and got back into the log cabin unobserved.
He found the place empty; the man known to him as A 25 was not anywhere to be seen. But finding his sleeping bunk — a bare slab resembling a butcher’s board — he stretched his coat over it where the bed had been, and then fled away like a guilty thing.
When the great fire had burned low the warder returned, and said, “Quick there; put on your coat and let’s be off.”
At that Jason pretended to look about him in dismay.
“It’s gone,” he said, in a tone of astonishment.
“Gone? What? Have you burnt it up with the beds?” cried the warder.
“Maybe so,” said Jason, meekly.
“Fool,” cried the warder; “but it’s your loss. Now you’ll have to go in your sheepskin jacket, snow or shine.”
With a cold smile about the corners of his mouth, Jason bent his head and went on ahead of his warder.
If the Captain of the Mines had been left to himself he might have been a just and even a merciful man, but he was badgered by inhuman orders from Jorgen Jorgensen at Reykjavik, and one by one the common privileges of his prisoners were withdrawn. As a result of his treatment, the prisoners besieged him with petitions as often as he crossed their path. The loudest to complain and the most rebellious against petty tyranny was Michael Sunlocks; the humblest, the meekest, the most silent under cruel persecution was Red Jason. The one seemed aflame with indignation; the other appeared destitute of all manly spirit.
“That man might be dangerous to the Government yet,” thought the Captain, after one of his stormy scenes with Michael Sunlocks. “That man’s heart is dead within him,” he thought again, as he watched Red Jason working as he always worked, slowly, listlessly, and as if tired out and longing for the night.
The Captain’s humanity at length prevailed over his Governor’s rigor, and he developed a form of penal servitude among the prisoners which he called the Free Command. This was a plan whereby the men whose behavior had been good were allowed the partial liberty of living outside the stockade in huts which they built for themselves. Ten hours a day they wrought at the mines, the rest of the day and night was under their own control; and in return for their labor they were supplied with rations from the settlement.
Now Red Jason, as a docile prisoner, was almost the first to get promotion to the Free Command. He did not ask for it, he did not wish for it, and when it came he looked askance at it.
“Send somebody else,” he said to his warders, but they laughed and turned him adrift.
He began to build his house of the lava stones on the mountain side, not far from the hospital, and near to a house being built by an elderly man much disfigured about the cheeks, who had been a priest, imprisoned long ago by Jorgen Jorgensen out of spite and yet baser motives. And as he worked at raising the walls of his hut, he remembered with a pang the mill he built in Port-y-Vullin, and what a whirlwind of outraged passion brought every stone of it to the ground again. With this occupation, and occasional gossip with his neighbor, he passed the evenings of his Free Command. And looking towards the hospital as often as he saw the little groups of men go up to it that told of another prisoner injured in the perilous labor of the sulphur mines, he sometimes saw a woman come out at the door to receive them.
“Who is she?” he asked of the priest.
“The foreign nurse,” said the priest. “And a right good woman, too, as I have reason to say, for she nursed me back to life after that spurt of hot water had scalded these holes into my face.”
That made Jason think of other scenes, and of tender passages in his broken life that were gone from him forever. He had no wish to recall them; their pleasure was too painful, their sweets too bitter; they were lost, and God grant that they could be forgotten. Yet every night as he worked at his walls he looked longingly across the shoulder of the hill in the direction of the hospital, half fancying he knew the sweet grace of the figure he sometimes saw there, and pretending with himself that he remembered the light rhythm of its movement. After a while he missed what he looked for, and then he asked his neighbor if the nurse were ill that he had not seen her lately.
“Ill? Well, yes,” said the old priest. “She has been turned away from the hospital.”
“What!” cried Jason; “you thought her a good nurse.”
“She was too good, my lad,” said the priest, “and a blackguard warder who had tried to corrupt her, and could not, announced that somebody else had done so.”
“It’s a lie,” cried Jason.
“It was plain enough,” said the priest, “that she was about to give birth to a child, and as she would make no explanation she was turned adrift.”
“Where is she now?” asked Jason.
“Lying in at the farmhouse on the edge of the snow yonder,” said the priest. “I saw her last night. She trusted me with her story, and it was straight and simple. Her husband had been sent out to the mines by the old scoundrel at Reykjavik. She had followed him, only to be near him and breathe the air he breathed. Perhaps with some wild hope of helping his escape she had hidden her true name and character and taken the place of a menial, being a lady born.”
“Then her husband is still at the mines?” said Jason.
“Yes,” said the priest.
“Does he know of her disgrace?”
“No.”
“What’s his name?”
“The poor soul would give me no name, but she knew her husband’s number. It was A 25.”
“I know him,” said Jason.
Next day, his hut being built and roofed after some fashion, Jason went down to the office of the Captain of the Mines and said, “I don’t like the Free Command, sir. May I give it up in favor of another man?”
“And what man, pray?” asked the Captain.
“A 25,” said Jason.
“No,” said the Captain.
“I’ve built my house, sir,” said Jason, “and if you won’t give it to A 25, let the poor woman from the hospital live in it, and take me back among the men.”
“That won’t do, my lad. Go along to your work,” said the Captain.
And when Jason was gone the Captain thought within himself, “What does this mean? Is the lad planning the man’s escape? And who is this English woman that she should be the next thought in his head?”
So the only result of Jason’s appeal was that Michael Sunlocks was watched the closer, worked the harder, persecuted the more by petty tyrannies, and that an order was sent up to the farmhouse where Greeba lay in the dear dishonor of her early motherhood, requiring her to leave the neighborhood of Krisuvik as speedily as her condition allowed.
This was when the long dark days of winter were beginning to fall back before the sweet light of spring. And when the snow died off the mountains, and the cold garment of the jokulls was sucked full of holes like the honeycomb, and the world that had been white grew black, and the flowers began to show in the corries, and the sweet summer was coming, coming, coming, then Jason went down to the Captain of the Mines again.
“I’ve come, sir,” he said, “to ask you to lock me up.”
“Why?” said the Captain, “what have you been doing?”
“Nothing,” said Jason, “but if you don’t prevent me, I’ll run away. This Free Command was bad enough to fear when the snow cut us off from all the world. But now that it is gone and the world is free, and the cuckoo is calling, he seems to be calling me, and I must go after him.”
“Go,” said the Captain, “and after you’ve tramped the deserts and swam the rivers, and slept on the ground, and starved on roots, we’ll fetch you back, for you can never escape us, and lash you as we have lashed the others who have done likewise.”
“If I go,” said Jason, defiantly, “you shall never fetch me back, and if you catch me you shall never punish me.”
“What? Do you threaten me?” cried the Captain.
Something in the prisoner’s face terrified him, though he would have scorned to acknowledge his fear, and he straightway directed that Jason should be degraded, for insolence and insubordination, from the Free Command to the gangs.
Now this was exactly what Jason wanted, for his heart had grown sick with longing for another sight of that face which stood up before his inward eye in the darkness of the night. But remembering Jason’s appeal on behalf of Michael Sunlocks, and his old suspicion regarding both, the Captain ordered that the two men should be kept apart.
So with Jason in the house by the sea, and Sunlocks in the house by the lake, the weeks went by; and the summer that was coming came, and like a bird of passage the darkness of night fled quite away, and the sun shone that shines at midnight.
And nothing did Jason see of the face that followed him in visions, and nothing did he hear of the man known to him as A 25, except reports of brutal treatment and fierce rebellion. But on a day — a month after he had returned to the stockade — he was going in his tired and listless way between warders from one solfatara at the foot of the hill to another on the breast of it, when he came upon a horror that made his blood run cold.
It was a man nailed by his right hand to a great socket of iron in a log of driftwood, with food and drink within sight but out of reach of him, and a huge knife lying close by his side. The man was A 25.
Jason saw everything and the meaning of everything in an instant, that to get at the food for which he starved that man must cut off his own right hand. And there, like a devil, at his left lay the weapon that was to tempt him.
Nothing so inhuman, so barbarous, so fiendish, so hellish, had Jason yet seen, and with a cry like the growl of an untamed beast, he broke from his warders, took the nail in his fingers like a vice, tore it up out of the bleeding hand, and set Michael Sunlocks free.
At the next instant his wrath was gone, and he had fallen back to his listless mood. Then the warders hurried up, laid hold of both men, and hustled them away with a brave show of strength and courage to the office of the Captain.
Jorgen Jorgensen himself was there, and it was he who had ordered the ruthless punishment. The warders told their tale, and he listened to them with a grin on his cruel face.
“Strap them up together,” he cried, “leg to leg and arm to arm.”
And when this was done he said, bitterly —
“So you two men are fond of one another’s company! Well, you shall have enough of it and to spare. Day after day, week after week, month after month, like as you are now, you shall live together, until you abhor and detest and loathe the sight of each other. Now go!”
CHAPTER III.
The Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Red Jason and Michael Sunlocks, now lashed together, were driven back to their work like beasts of the field. They knew well what their punishment meant to them — that in every hour of life henceforward, in every act, through every thought, each man should drag a human carcase by his side. The barbarity of their doom was hideous; but strangely different were the ways they accepted it. Michael Sunlocks was aflame with indignation; Jason was crushed with shame. The upturned face of Sunlocks was pale, his flaxen hair was dishevelled, his bloodshot eyes were afire. But Jason’s eyes, full of confusion, were bent on the ground, his tanned face trembled visibly, and his red hair, grown long as of old, fell over his drooping shoulders like a mantle of blood.
And as they trudged along, side by side, in the first hours of their unnatural partnership, Sunlocks struggled hard to keep his eyes from the man with whom he was condemned to live and die, lest the gorge of his very soul should rise at the sight of him. So he never once looked at Jason through many hours of that day. And Jason, on his part, laboring with the thought that it was he who by his rash act had brought both of them to this sore pass, never once lifted his eyes to the face of Sunlocks.
Yet each man knew the other’s thought before ever a word had passed between them. Jason felt that Sunlocks already abhorred him, and Sunlocks knew that Jason was ashamed. This brought them after a time into sympathy of some sort, and Jason tried to speak and Sunlocks to listen.
“I did not mean to bring you to this,” said Jason, humbly. And Sunlocks, with head aside, answered as well as he could for the disgust that choked him, “You did it for the best.”
“But you will hate me for it,” said Jason.
And once again, with what composure he could command, Sunlocks answered, “How could I hate you for saving me from such brutal treatment.”
“Then you don’t regret it?” said Jason, pleadingly.
“It is for you, not me, to regret it,” said Sunlocks.
“Me?” said Jason.
Through all the shameful hours the sense of his own loss had never yet come to him. From first to last he had thought only of Sunlocks.
“My liberty was gone already,” said Sunlocks. “But you were free — free as anyone can be in this hell on earth. Now you are bound — you are here like this — and I am the cause of it.”
Then Jason’s rugged face was suddenly lit up with a surprising joy. “That’s nothing,” he said.
“Nothing?” said Sunlocks.
“I mean that I care nothing, if you don’t,” said Jason.
It was the turn of Sunlocks to feel surprise. He half turned towards Jason. “Then you don’t regret it?” he asked.
“No,” said Jason firmly. “And you?”
Sunlocks felt that tears, not disgust, were choking him now.
“No,” he answered, shamefacedly, turning his head away.
“March!” shouted the warders, who had been drinking their smuggled sneps while their prisoners had been talking.
That day, Jorgen Jorgensen went back to Reykjavik, for the time of Althing was near, and he had to prepare for his fourteen days at Thingvellir. And the Governor being gone, the Captain of the Mines made bold so far to relax the inhumanity of his sentence as to order that the two men who were bound together during the hours of work should be separated for the hours of sleep. But never forgetting his own suspicion that Red Jason was an ally of Michael Sunlocks, planning his escape, he ordered also that no speech should be allowed to pass between them. To prevent all communion of this kind he directed that the men should work and sleep apart from the other prisoners, and that their two warders should attend them night and day.
But though the rigor of discipline kept them back from free intercourse, no watchfulness could check the stolen words of comfort that helped the weary men to bear their degrading lot.
That night, the first of their life together, Michael Sunlocks looked into Jason’s face and said, “I have seen you before somewhere. Where was it?”
But Jason remembered the hot words that had pursued him on the day of the burning of the beds, and so he made no answer.
After awhile, Michael Sunlocks looked closely into Jason’s face again, and said, “What is your name?”
“Don’t ask it,” said Jason.
“Why not,” said Sunlocks.
“You might remember it.”
“Even so, what then?”
“Then you might also remember what I did, or tried to do, and you would hate me for it,” said Jason.
“Was your crime so inhuman?” said Sunlocks.
“It would seem so,” said Jason.
“Who sent you here?”
“The Republic.”
“You won’t tell me your name?”
“I’ve got none, so to speak, having had no father to give me one. I’m alone in the world.”
Michael Sunlocks did not sleep much that night, for the wound in his hand was very painful, and next morning, while Jason dressed it, he looked into his face once more and said, “You say you are alone in the world.”
“Yes,” said Jason.
“What of your mother?”
“She’s dead, poor soul.”
“Have you no sister?”
“No.”
“Nor brother?”
“No — that’s to say — no, no.”
“No one belonging to you?”
“No.”
“Are you quite alone?”
“Ay, quite,” said Jason. “No one to think twice what becomes of me. Nobody to trouble whether I am here or in a better place. Nobody to care whether I live or die.”
He tried to laugh as he said this, but in spite of his brave show of unconcern his deep voice broke and his strong face quivered.
