John Kline - "Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary"

Various - "What Great Men Have Said About Women"

William Harrison Ainsworth - "Jack Sheppard"

Thomas Jefferson - "Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson"

A Life Split in Two
An astonishing account of the intricate and unexpected swarm intelligence of wasps, bees, ants and termites.

E Pluribus Unum
Two centuries after Gibbon, a historian plots the trajectory of another great empire’s demise.

Little Britain
Carolyn Chute’s new novel is a love song to a voiceless part of America: the rural poor.

Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer - Romance

J >> Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer >> Romance




Salazar began to tell a long, exaggerated story about his cook, whom he
had imported from Paris.

"Think," he said; "I bring the fool two thousand miles--and then--not
even able to begin on a land-crab. A fool!"

The Nova Scotian cast an uninterested side glance at him, and said in
English, which Salazar did not understand:

"So you went there, after all? And now _he's_ got you." I did not answer
him. "I know all about you," he added.

"It's more than I do about you," I said.

He rose and suddenly jerked the door open, peered on each side of the
corridor, and then sat down again.

"I'm not afraid to tell," he said defiantly. "I'm not afraid of
anything. I'm safe."

The Cuban said to me in Spanish: "This senor is my friend. Everyone who
hates that devil is my friend."

"I'm safe," Nichols repeated. "I know too much about our friend the
raparee." He lowered his voice. "They say you're to be given up for
piracy, eh?" His eyes had an extraordinarily anxious leer. "You are now,
eh? For how much? Can't you tell a man? We're in the same boat! I kin
help you!"

Salazar accidentally knocked a silver goblet off the table and, at the
sound, Nichols sprang half off his chair. He glared in a wild stare
around him then grasped at a flagon of _aguardiente_ and drank.

"I'm not afraid of any damn thing" he said. "I've got a hold on that
man. He dursen't give me up. I kin see! He's going to give you up and
say you're responsible for it all."

"I don't know what he's going to do," I answered.

"Will you not, Senor," Salazar said suddenly, "relate, if you can
without distress, the heroic death of that venerated man?"

I glanced involuntarily at Nichols. "The distress," I said, "would be
very great. I was Don Balthasar's kinsman. The Senor O'Brien had a great
fear of my influence in the Casa. It was in trying to take me away
that Don Balthasar, who defended me, was slain by the _Lugarenos_ of
O'Brien."

Salazar said, "Aha! Aha! We are kindred spirits. Hated and loved by the
same souls. This fiend, Senor. And then...."

"I escaped by sea--in an open boat, in the confusion. When I reached
Havana, the _Juez_ had me arrested."

Salazar raised both hands; his gestures, made for large, grave men, were
comic in him. They reduced Spanish manners to absurdity. He said:

"That man dies. That man dies. To-morrow I go to the Captain-General.
He shall hear this story of yours, Senor. He shall know of these
machinations which bring honest men to this place. We are a band of
brothers...."

"That's what I say." Nichols leered at me. "We're all in the same boat."

I expect he noticed that I wasn't moved by his declaration. He said,
still in English:

"Let us be open. Let's have a council of war. This O'Brien hates me
because I wouldn't fire on my own countrymen." He glanced furtively at
me. "I wouldn't," he asserted; "he wanted me to fire into their boats;
but I wouldn't. Don't you believe the tales they tell about me! They
tell worse about you. Who says I would fire on my countrymen? Where's
the man who says it?" He had been drinking more brandy and glared
ferociously at me. "None of your tricks, my hearty," he said. "None of
your getting out and spreading tales. O'Brien's my friend; he'll never
give me up. He dursen't. I know too much. You're a pirate! No doubt it
was you who fired into them boats. By God I'll be witness against you if
they give me up. I'll show you up."

All the while the little Cuban talked swiftly and with a saturnine
enthusiasm. He passed the wine rapidly.

"My own countrymen!" Nichols shouted. "Never! I shot a Yankee
lieutenant--Allen he was--with my own hand. That's another thing. I'm
not a man to trifle with. No, sir. Don't you try it.... Why, I've papers
that would hang O'Brien. I sent them home to Halifax. I know a trick
worth his. By God, let him try it! Let him only try it. He dursen't give
me up...."

The man in livery came in to snuff the candles. Nichols sprang from his
seat in a panic and drew his knife with frantic haste. He continued,
glaring at me from the wall, the knife in his hand:

"Don't you dream of tricks. I've cut more throats than you've kissed
gals in your little life."

Salazar himself drew an immense pointed knife with a shagreen hilt. He
kissed it rapturously.

"Aha!... Aha!" he said, "bear this kiss into his ribs at the back." His
eyes glistened with this mania. "I swear it; when I next see this dog;
this friend of the priests." He threw the knife on the table. "Look," he
said, "was ever steel truer or more thirsty?"

"Don't you make no mistake," Nichols continued to me. "Don't you think
to presume. O'Brien's my friend. I'm here snug and out of the way of the
old fool of an admiral. That's why he's kept waiting off the Morro. When
he goes, I walk out free. Don't you try to frighten me. I'm not a man to
be frightened."

Salazar bubbled: "Ah, but now the wine flows and is red. We are a band
of brothers, each loving the other. Brothers, let us drink."

The air of close confinement, the blaze, the feel of the jail, pressed
upon me, and I felt sore, suddenly, at having eaten and drunk with those
two. The idea of Seraphina, asleep perhaps, crying perhaps, something
pure and distant and very blissful, came in upon me irresistibly.

The little Cuban said, "We have had a very delightful conversation. It
is very plain this O'Brien must die."

I rose to my feet. "Gentlemen," I said in Spanish, "I am very weary; I
will go and sleep in the corridor."

The Cuban sprang towards me with an immense anxiety of hospitableness.
I was to sleep on his couch, the couch of cloth of gold. It was
impossible, it was insulting, that I should think of sleeping in the
corridor. He thrust me gently down upon it, making with his plump hands
the motions of smoothing it to receive me. I lay down and turned my face
to the wall.

It wasn't possible to sleep, even though the little Cuban, with a tender
solicitude, went round the walls blowing out the candles. He might be
useful to me, might really explain matters to the Captain-General, or
might even, as a last resource, take a letter from me to the British
Consul. But I should have to be alone with him. Nichols was an
abominable scoundrel; bloodthirsty to the defenceless; a liar; craven
before the ghost of a threat. No doubt O'Brien did not want to give him
up. Perhaps he _had_ papers. And no doubt, once he could find a trace of
Seraphina's whereabouts, O'Brien would give me up. All I could do was to
hope for a gain of time. And yet, if I gained time, it could only mean
that I should in the end be given up to the admiral.

And Seraphina's whereabouts. It came over me lamentably that I myself
did not know. The _Lion_ might have sailed. It was possible. She might
be at sea. Then, perhaps, my only chance of ever seeing her again lay in
my being given up to the admiral, to stand in England a trial, perhaps
for piracy, perhaps for treason. I might meet her only in England, after
many years of imprisonment. It wasn't possible. I would not believe in
the possibility. How I loved her! How wildly, how irrationally--this
woman of another race, of another world, bound to me by sufferings
together, by joys together. Irrationally! Looking at the matter now,
the reason is plain enough. Before then I had not lived. I had only
waited--for her and for what she stood for. It was in my blood, in my
race, in my tradition, in my training. We, all of us for generations,
had made for efficiency, for drill, for restraint. Our Romance was just
this very Spanish contrast, this obliquity of vision, this slight
tilt of the convex mirror that shaped the same world so differently to
onlookers at different points of its circle.

I could feel a little of it even then, when there was only the merest
chance of my going back to England and getting back towards our old
position on the rim of the mirror. The deviousness, the wayward passion,
even the sempiternal abuses of the land were already beginning to take
the aspect of something like quaint impotence. It was charm that, now I
was on the road away, was becoming apparent. The inconveniences of life,
the physical discomforts, the smells of streets, the heat, dropped into
the background. I felt that I did not want to go away, irrevocably from
a land sanctioned by her presence, her young life. I turned uneasily
to the other side. At the heavy black table, in the light of a single
candle, the Cuban and the Nova Scotian were discussing, their heads
close together.

"I tell you no," Nichols was saying in a fluent, abominable, literal
translation into Spanish. "Take the knife so... thumb upwards. Stab down
in the soft between the neck and the shoulder-blade. You get right into
the lungs with the point. I've tried it: ten times. Never stick the
back. The chances are he moves, and you hit a bone. There are no bones
there. It's the way they kill pigs in New Jersey."

The Cuban bent his brows as if he were reflecting over a chessboard.
"Ma...." he pondered. His knife was lying on the table. He unsheathed
it, then got up, and moved behind the seated Nova Scotian.

"You say... there?" he asked, pressing his little finger at the base of
Nichols' skinny column of a neck. "And then..." He measured the length
of the knife on Nichols's back twice with elaborate care, breathing
through his nostrils. Then he said with a convinced, musing air, "It is
true. It would go down into the lungs."

"And there are arteries and things," Nichols said.

"Yes, yes," the Cuban answered, sheathing the knife and thrusting it
into his belt.

"With a knife that length it's perfect." Nichols waved his shadowy hand
towards Salazar's scarf. Salazar moved off a little.

"I see the advantages," he said. "No crying out, because of the blood in
the lungs. I thank yous Senor Escoces."

Nichols rose, lurching to his full height, and looked in my direction. I
closed my eyes. I did not wish him to talk to me. I heard him say:

"Well, _hasta mas ver_. I shall get away from here. Good-night."

He swayed an immense shadow through the door. Salazar took the candle
and followed him into the corridor.

Yes, that was it, why she was so great a part, a whole wall, a whole
beam of my life's house. I saw her suddenly in the blackness, her full
red lips, her quivering nostrils, the curve of her breasts, her lithe
movements from the hips, the way she set her feet down, the white flower
waxen in the darkness of her hair, and the robin-wing flutter of her
lids over her gray eyes when she smiled. I moved convulsively in my
intense desire. I would have given my soul, my share of eternity, my
honour, only to see that flutter of the lids over the shining gray eyes.
I never felt I was beneath the imponderable pressure of a prison's wall
till then. She was infinite miles away; I could not even imagine what
inanimate things surrounded her. She must be talking to someone else;
fluttering her lids like that. I recognized with a physical agony that
was more than jealousy how slight was my hold upon her. It was not in
her race, in her blood as in mine, to love me and my type. She had lived
all her life in the middle of Romance, and the very fire and passion
of her South must make me dim prose to her. I remember the flicker
of Salazar's returning candle, cast in lines like an advancing scythe
across the two walls from the corridor. I slept.

I had the feeling of appalled horror suddenly invading my sleep; a vast
voice seemed to be exclaiming:

"Tell me where she is!"

I looked at the glowing horn of a lanthorn. It was O'Brien who held it.
He stood over me, very sombre.

"Tell me where she is," he said, the moment my eyes opened.

I said, "She's... she's------I don't know."

It appalls me even now to think how narrow was my escape. It was only
because I had gone to sleep in the thought that I did not know, that I
answered that I did not know. Ah--he was a cunning devil! To suddenly
wake one; to get one's thoughts before one had had time to think! I lay
looking at him, shivering. I couldn't even see much of his face.

"Where is she?" he said again. "Where? Dead? Dead? God have mercy on
your soul if the child is dead!"

I was still trembling. If I had told him!--I could hardly believe I had
not. He continued bending over me with an attitude that hideously mocked
solicitude.

"Where is she?" he asked again.

"Ransack the island," I said. He glared at me, lifting the lamp. "The
whole earth, if you like."

He ground his teeth, bending very low over me; then stood up, raising
his head into the shadow above the lamp.

"What do I care for all the admirals?" he was speaking to himself.
"No ship shall leave Havana till...." He groaned. I heard him slap his
forehead, and say distractedly, "But perhaps she is not in a ship."

There was a silence in which I heard him breathe heavily, and then he
amazed me by saying:

"Have pity."

I laughed, lying on my back. "On you!"

He bent down. "Fool! on yourself."

A vast and towering shadow ran along the wall.

There wasn't a sound. The face of Salazar appeared behind him, and an
uplifted hand grasping a knife. O'Brien saw the horror in my eyes. I
gasped to him: "Look...." and before he could move the knife went softly
home between neck and shoulder. Salazar glided to the door and turned to
wave his hand at me. O'Brien's lips were pressed tightly together, the
handle of the knife was against his ear, the lanthorn hung at the end of
his rigid arm for a moment. As he lowered it, the blood spurted from
his shoulder as if from a burst stand-pipe, only black and warm. It fell
over my face, over my hands, everywhere. For a minute of eternity his
agonized eyes searched my features, as if to discern whether I had
connived, whether I condoned.

I had started up, my face coming right against his. I felt an immense
horror. What did it mean? What had he done? He had been such a power for
so long, so inevitably, over my whole life that I could not even begin
to understand that this was not some new subtle villainy of his. He
shook his head slowly, his ear disturbing the knife.

Then he turned jerkily on his heel, the lanthorn swinging round and
leaving me in his shadow. There were ten paces to reach the door. It
was like the finish of a race whether he would cover the remaining seven
after the first three steps. The dangling lanthorn shed small patches of
light through the holes in the metal top, like sunlight through leaves,
upon the gloom of the remote ceiling. At the fifth step he pressed his
hand spasmodically to his mouth; at the sixth he wavered to one side.
I made a sudden motion as if to save him from falling. He was dying!
He was dying! I hardly realized what it meant. This immense weight was
being removed from me. I had no need to fear him any more. I couldn't
understand, I could only look. This was his passing. This....

He sank, knelt down, placing the Ian thorn on the floor. He covered his
face with his hands and began to cough incessantly, like a man dying of
consumption. The glowing top of the lanthorn hissed and sputtered out in
little sharp blows, like hammer strokes... Carlos had coughed like that.
Carlos was dead. Now O'Brien! He was going. I should escape. It was all
over. Was it all over? He bowed stiffly forward, placing his hands on
the stones, then lay over on his side with his face to the light, his
eyes glaring at it. I sat motionless, watching him. The lanthorn lit
the carved leg of the black table and a dusty circle of the flags.
The spurts of blood from his shoulder grew less long in answer to the
pulsing of his heart; his fists unclenched, he drew his legs up to
his body, then sank down. His eyes looked suddenly at mine and, as the
features slowly relaxed, the smile seemed to come back, enigmatic, round
his mouth.

He was dead; he was gone; I was free! He would never know where she was;
never! He had gone, with the question on his lips; with the agony of
uncertainty in his eyes. From the door came an immense, grotesque, and
horrible chuckle.

"Aha!-Aha! I have saved you, Senor, I have protected you. We are as
brothers."

Against the tenuous blue light of the dawn Salazar was gesticulating in
the doorway. I felt a sudden repulsion; a feeling of intense disgust.
O'Brien lying there, I almost wished alive again--I wanted to have
him again, rather than that I should have been relieved of him by that
atrocious murder. I sat looking at both of them.

Saved! By that lunatic? I suddenly appreciated the agony of mind that
alone could have brought O'Brien, the cautious, the all-seeing, into
this place--. to ask me a question that for him was answered now.
Answered for him more than for me.

Where was Seraphina? Where? How should I come to her? O'Brien was dead.
And I.... Could I walk out of this place and go to her? O'Brien was
dead. But I...

I suddenly realized that now I was the pirate Nikola el Escoces--that
now he was no more there, nothing could save me from being handed over
to the admiral. Nothing.

Salazar outside the door began to call boastfully towards the sound of
approaching footsteps.'

"Aha! Aha! Come all of you! See what I have done! Come, Senor Alcayde!
Come, brave soldiers..."

In that way died this man whose passion had for so long hung over my
life like a shadow. Looking at the matter now, I am, perhaps, glad that
he fell neither by my hand nor in my quarrel. I assuredly had injured
him the first; I had come upon his ground; I had thwarted him; I had
been a heavy weight at a time when his fortunes had been failing.
Failing they undoubtedly were. He had run his course too far.

And, if his death removed him out of my path, the legacy of his intrigue
caused me suffering enough. Had he lived, there is no knowing what he
might have done. He was bound to deliver someone to the British--either
myself or Nichols. Perhaps, at the last moment, he would have kept me in
Havana. There is no saying.

Undoubtedly he had not wished to deliver Nichols; either because he
really knew too much or because he had scruples. Nichols had certainly
been faithful to him. And, with his fine irony, it was delightful to him
to think that I should die a felon's death in England. For those reasons
he had identified me with Nikola el Escoces, intending to give up
whichever suited him at the last moment.

Now that was settled for him and for me. The delivery was to take
place at dawn, and O'Brien not to be found, the old Judge of the First
Instance had been sent to identify the prisoner. He selected me, whom,
of course, he recognized. There was no question of Nichols, who had been
imprisoned on a charge of theft trumped up by O'Brien.

Salazar, whether he would have gone to the Captain-General or not, was
now entirely useless. He was retained to answer the charge of murder.
And to any protestations I could make, the old _Juez_ was entirely deaf.

"The senor must make representations to his own authorities," he said.
"I have warrant for what I have done."

It was impossible to expose O'Brien to him. The soldiers of the escort,
in the dawn before the prison gates, simply laughed at me.

They marched me down through the gray mists, to the water's edge. Two
soldiers held my arms; O'Brien's blood was drying on my face and on my
clothes. I was, even to myself, a miserable object. Among the negresses
on the slimy boat-steps a thick, short man was asking questions. He
opened amazed eyes at the sight of me. It was Williams--the _Lion_ was
not yet gone then. If he spoke to me, or gave token of connection with
Seraphina, the Spaniards would understand. They would take her from him
certainly; perhaps immure her in a convent. And now that I was bound
irrevocably for England, she must go, too. He was shouldering his way
towards my guards.

"Silence!" I shouted, without looking at him. "Go away, make sail....
Tell Sebright...."

My guards seemed to think I had gone mad; they laid hands upon me. I
didn't struggle, and we passed down towards the landing steps, brushing
Williams aside. He stood perturbedly gazing after me; then I saw him
asking questions of a civil guard. A man-of-war's boat, the ensign
trailing in the glassy water, the glazed hats of the seamen bobbing like
clockwork, was flying towards us. Here was England! Here was home! I
should have to clear myself of felony, to strain every nerve and cheat
the gallows. If only Williams understood, if only he did not make a fool
of himself. I couldn't see him any more; a jabbering crowd all round
us was being kept at a distance by the muskets of the soldiers. My only
chance was Sebright's intelligence. He might prevent Williams making a
fool of himself. The commander of the guard said to the lieutenant from
the flagship, who had landed, attended by the master-at-arms:

"I have the honour to deliver to your worship's custody the prisoner
promised to his excellency the English admiral. Here are the papers
disclosing his crimes to the justice. I beg for a receipt."

A shabby _escrivano_ from the prison advanced bowing, with an inkhorn,
shaking a wet goose-quill. A _guardia civil_ offered his back. The
lieutenant signed a paper hastily, then looking hard at me, gave the
order:

"Master-at-arms, handcuff one of the prisoner's hands to your own wrist.
He is a desperate character."




CHAPTER THREE

The first decent word I had spoken to me after that for months came
from my turnkey at Newgate. It was when he welcomed me back from my
examination before the Thames Court magistrate. The magistrate, a
bad-tempered man, snuffy, with red eyes, and the air of being a piece of
worn and dirty furniture of his court, had snapped at me when I tried to
speak:

"Keep your lies for the Admiralty Session. I've only time to commit you.
Damn your Spaniards; why can't they translate their own papers;" had
signed something with a squeaky quill, tossed it to his clerk, and
grunted, "Next case."

I had gone back to Newgate.

The turnkey, a man with the air of an innkeeper, bandy-legged, with
a bulbous, purple-veined nose and watering eyes, slipped out of the
gatehouse door, whilst the great, hollow-sounding gate still shook
behind me. He said:

"If you hurries up you'll see a bit of life.... Do you good. Condemned
sermon. Being preached in the chapel now; sheriffs and all. They swing
tomorrow--three of them. Quick with the stumps."

He hurried me over the desolate mossy-green cobbles of the great
solitary yard into a square, tall, bare, whitewashed place. Already
from the outside one caught a droning voice. There might have been three
hundred people there, boxed off in pews, with turnkeys at each end.
A vast king's arms, a splash of red and blue gilt, sprawled above a
two-tiered pulpit that was like the trunk of a large broken tree. The
turnkey pulled my hat off, and nudged me into a box beside the door.

"Kneel down," he whispered hoarsely.

I knelt. A man with a new wig was droning out words, waving his hands
now and then from the top of the tall pulpit. Beneath him a smaller man
in an old wig was dozing, his head bent forward. The place was dirty,
and ill-lighted by the tall, grimy windows, heavily barred. A pair of
candles flickered beside the preacher's right arm....

"They that go down to the sea in ships, my poor brethren," he droned,
"lying under the shadow..."

He directed his hands towards a tall deal box painted black, isolated in
the centre of the lower floor. A man with a red head sat in it, his arms
folded; another had his arms covering his head, which leant abjectly
forward on the rail in front. There were large rusty gyves upon his
wrists.

"But observe, my poor friends," the chaplain droned on, "the psalmist
saith, 'At the last He shall bring them unto the desired haven.' Now..."

The turnkey whispered suddenly into my ear: "Them's the condemned he's
preaching at, them in the black pew. See Roguey Cullen wink at the woman
prisoners up there in the gallery.... Him with the red hair.... All
swings to-morrow."

"After they have staggered and reeled to and fro, and been amazed...
observe. After they have been tempted; even after they have fallen...."

The sheriffs had their eyes decorously closed. The clerk reached up from
below the preacher, and snuffed one of the candles. The preacher paused
to rearrange his shining wig. Little clouds of powder flew out where he
touched it. He struck his purple velvet cushion, and continued:

"At the last, I say, He shall bring them to the haven they had desired."

A jarring shriek rose out of the black pew, and an insensate jangling
of irons rattled against the hollow wood. The ironed man, whose head
had been hidden, was writhing in an epileptic fit. The governor began
signalling to the jailers, and the whole dismal assembly rose to its
feet, and craned to get a sight. The jailers began hurrying them out of
the building. The redheaded man was crouching in the far corner of the
black box.

The turnkey caught the end of my sleeve, and hurried me out of the door.

"Come away," he said. "Come out of it.... Damn my good nature."

We went swiftly through the tall, gloomy, echoing stone passages. All
the time there was the noise of the prisoners being marshalled somewhere
into their distant yards and cells. We went across the bottom of a well,
where the weeping December light struck ghastly down on to the
stones, into a sort of rabbit-warren of black passages and descending
staircases, a horror of cold, solitude, and night. Iron door after iron
door clanged to behind us in the stony blackness. After an interminable
traversing, the turnkey, still with his hand on my sleeve, jerked me
into my familiar cell. I hadn't thought to be glad to get back to that
dim, frozen, damp-chilled little hole; with its hateful stone walls,
stone ceiling, stone floor, stone bed-slab, and stone table; its rope
mat, foul stable-blanket, its horrible sense of eternal burial, out of
sound, out of sight under a mined mountain of black stones. It was so
tiny that the turnkey, entering after me, seemed to be pressed close up
to my chest, and so dark that I could not see the colour of the dirty
hair that fell matted from the bald patch on the top of his skull; so
familiar that I knew the feel of every little worming of rust on the
iron candlestick. He wiped his face with a brown rag of handkerchief,
and said:

Copyright (c) 2007. topmasterworks.com. All rights reserved.