Israel Potter/Chapters 21-25

by Herman Melville

 

CHAPTER XXI.

SAMSON AMONG THE PHILISTINES.

At length, as the ship, gliding on past three or four vessels at anchor in the roadstead—­one, a man-of-war just furling her sails—­came nigh Falmouth town, Israel, from his perch, saw crowds in violent commotion on the shore, while the adjacent roofs were covered with sightseers.  A large man-of-war cutter was just landing its occupants, among whom were a corporal’s guard and three officers, besides the naval lieutenant and boat’s crew.  Some of this company having landed, and formed a sort of lane among the mob, two trim soldiers, armed to the teeth, rose in the stern-sheets; and between them, a martial man of Patagonian stature, their ragged and handcuffed captive, whose defiant head overshadowed theirs, as St. Paul’s dome its inferior steeples.  Immediately the mob raised a shout, pressing in curiosity towards the colossal stranger; so that, drawing their swords, four of the soldiers had to force a passage for their comrades, who followed on, conducting the giant.

As the letter of marque drew still nigher, Israel heard the officer in command of the party ashore shouting, “To the castle! to the castle!” and so, surrounded by shouting throngs, the company moved on, preceded by the three drawn swords, ever and anon flourished at the rioters, towards a large grim pile on a cliff about a mile from the landing.  Long as they were in sight, the bulky form of the captive was seen at times swayingly towering over the flashing bayonets and cutlasses, like a great whale breaching amid a hostile retinue of sword-fish.  Now and then, too, with barbaric scorn, he taunted them with cramped gestures of his manacled hands.

When at last the vessel had gained her anchorage, opposite a distant detached warehouse, all was still; and the work of breaking out in the hold immediately commencing, and continuing till nightfall, absorbed all further attention for the present.

Next day was Sunday; and about noon Israel, with others, was allowed to go ashore for a stroll.  The town was quiet.  Seeing nothing very interesting there, he passed out, alone, into the fields alongshore, and presently found himself climbing the cliff whereon stood the grim pile before spoken of.

“What place is yon?” he asked of a rustic passing.

“Pendennis Castle.”

As he stepped upon the short crisp sward under its walls, he started at a violent sound from within, as of the roar of some tormented lion.  Soon the sound became articulate, and he heard the following words bayed out with an amazing vigor: 

“Brag no more, Old England; consider you are but an island!  Order back your broken battalions! home, and repent in ashes!  Long enough have your hired tories across the sea forgotten the Lord their God, and bowed down to Howe and Kniphausen—­the Hessian!—­Hands off, red-skinned jackal!  Wearing the king’s plate,[A] as I do, I have treasures of wrath against you British.”

[Footnote A:  Meaning, probably, certain manacles.]

Then came a clanking, as of a chain; many vengeful sounds, all confusedly together; with strugglings.  Then again the voice: 

“Ye brought me out here, from my dungeon to this green—­affronting yon Sabbath sun—­to see how a rebel looks.  But I show ye how a true gentleman and Christian can conduct in adversity.  Back, dogs!  Respect a gentleman and a Christian, though he be in rags and smell of bilge-water.”

Filled with astonishment at these words, which came from over a massive wall, enclosing what seemed an open parade-space, Israel pressed forward, and soon came to a black archway, leading far within, underneath, to a grassy tract, through a tower.  Like two boar’s tusks, two sentries stood on guard at either side of the open jaws of the arch.  Scrutinizing our adventurer a moment, they signed him permission to enter.

Arrived at the end of the arched-way, where the sun shone, Israel stood transfixed, at the scene.

Like some baited bull in the ring, crouched the Patagonian-looking captive, handcuffed as before; the grass of the green trampled, and gored up all about him, both by his own movements and those of the people around.  Except some soldiers and sailors, these seemed mostly townspeople, collected here out of curiosity.  The stranger was outlandishly arrayed in the sorry remains of a half-Indian, half-Canadian sort of a dress, consisting of a fawn-skin jacket—­the fur outside and hanging in ragged tufts—­a half-rotten, bark-like belt of wampum; aged breeches of sagathy; bedarned worsted stockings to the knee; old moccasins riddled with holes, their metal tags yellow with salt-water rust; a faded red woollen bonnet, not unlike a Russian night-cap, or a portentous, ensanguined full-moon, all soiled, and stuck about with bits of half-rotted straw.  He seemed just broken from the dead leases in David’s outlawed Cave of Adullam.  Unshaven, beard and hair matted, and profuse as a corn-field beaten down by hailstorms, his whole marred aspect was that of some wild beast; but of a royal sort, and unsubdued by the cage.

“Aye, stare, stare!  Though but last night dragged out of a ship’s hold, like a smutty tierce; and this morning out of your littered barracks here, like a murderer; for all that, you may well stare at Ethan Ticonderoga Allen, the unconquered soldier, by ----!  You Turks never saw a Christian before.  Stare on!  I am he, who, when your Lord Howe wanted to bribe a patriot to fall down and worship him by an offer of a major-generalship and five thousand acres of choice land in old Vermont—­(Ha! three-times-three for glorious old Vermont, and my Green-Mountain boys!  Hurrah!  Hurrah!  Hurrah!) I am he, I say, who answered your Lord Howe, ’You, you offer our land?  You are like the devil in Scripture, offering all the kingdoms in the world, when the d----d soul had not a corner-lot on earth!  Stare on!’”

“Look you, rebel, you had best heed how you talk against General Lord Howe,” here said a thin, wasp-waisted, epauletted officer of the castle, coming near and flourishing his sword like a schoolmaster’s ferule.

“General Lord Howe?  Heed how I talk of that toad-hearted king’s lick-spittle of a scarlet poltroon; the vilest wriggler in God’s worm-hole below?  I tell you, that herds of red-haired devils are impatiently snorting to ladle Lord Howe with all his gang (you included) into the seethingest syrups of tophet’s flames!”

At this blast, the wasp-waisted officer was blown backwards as from before the suddenly burst head of a steam-boiler.

Staggering away, with a snapped spine, he muttered something about its being beneath his dignity to bandy further words with a low-lived rebel.

“Come, come, Colonel Allen,” here said a mild-looking man in a sort of clerical undress, “respect the day better than to talk thus of what lies beyond.  Were you to die this hour, or what is more probable, be hung next week at Tower-wharf, you know not what might become, in eternity, of yourself.”

“Reverend Sir,” with a mocking bow, “when not better employed braiding my beard, I have a little dabbled in your theologies.  And let me tell you, Reverend Sir,” lowering and intensifying his voice, “that as to the world of spirits, of which you hint, though I know nothing of the mode or manner of that world, no more than do you, yet I expect when I shall arrive there to be treated as well as any other gentleman of my merit.  That is to say, far better than you British know how to treat an American officer and meek-hearted Christian captured in honorable war, by ----!  Every one tells me, as you yourself just breathed, and as, crossing the sea, every billow dinned into my ear, that I, Ethan Allen, am to be hung like a thief.  If I am, the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress shall avenge me; while I, for my part, shall show you, even on the tree, how a Christian gentleman can die.  Meantime, sir, if you are the clergyman you look, act out your consolatory function, by getting an unfortunate Christian gentleman about to die, a bowl of punch.”

The good-natured stranger, not to have his religious courtesy appealed to in vain, immediately dispatched his servant, who stood by, to procure the beverage.

At this juncture, a faint rustling sound, as of the advance of an army with banners, was heard.  Silks, scarfs, and ribbons fluttered in the background.  Presently, a bright squadron of fair ladies drew nigh, escorted by certain outriding gallants of Falmouth.

“Ah,” sighed a soft voice, “what a strange sash, and furred vest, and what leopard-like teeth, and what flaxen hair, but all mildewed;—­is that he?”

“Yea, is it, lovely charmer,” said Allen, like an Ottoman, bowing over his broad, bovine forehead, and breathing the words out like a lute; “it is he—­Ethan Allen, the soldier; now, since ladies’ eyes visit him, made trebly a captive.”

“Why, he talks like a beau in a parlor, this wild, mossed American from the woods,” sighed another fair lady to her mate; “but can this be he we came to see?  I must have a lock of his hair.”

“It is he, adorable Delilah; and fear not, even though incited by the foe, by clipping my locks, to dwindle my strength.  Give me your sword, man,” turning to an officer:—­“Ah!  I’m fettered.  Clip it yourself, lady.”

“No, no—­I am—­”

“Afraid, would you say?  Afraid of the vowed friend and champion of all ladies all round the world?  Nay, nay, come hither.”

The lady advanced; and soon, overcoming her timidity, her white hand shone like whipped foam amid the matted waves of flaxen hair.

“Ah, this is like clipping tangled tags of gold-lace,” cried she; “but see, it is half straw.”

“But the wearer is no man-of-straw, lady; were I free, and you had ten thousand foes—­horse, foot, and dragoons—­how like a friend I could fight for you!  Come, you have robbed me of my hair; let me rob your dainty hand of its price.  What, afraid again?”

“No, not that; but—­”

“I see, lady; I may do it, by your leave, but not by your word; the wonted way of ladies.  There, it is done.  Sweeter that kiss, than the bitter heart of a cherry.”

When at length this lady left, no small talk was had by her with her companions about someway relieving the hard lot of so knightly an unfortunate.  Whereupon a worthy, judicious gentleman, of middle-age, in attendance, suggested a bottle of good wine every day, and clean linen once every week.  And these the gentle Englishwoman—­too polite and too good to be fastidious—­did indeed actually send to Ethan Allen, so long as he tarried a captive in her land.

The withdrawal of this company was followed by a different scene.

A perspiring man in top-boots, a riding-whip in his hand, and having the air of a prosperous farmer, brushed in, like a stray bullock, among the rest, for a peep at the giant; having just entered through the arch, as the ladies passed out.

“Hearing that the man who took Ticonderoga was here in Pendennis Castle, I’ve ridden twenty-five miles to see him; and to-morrow my brother will ride forty for the same purpose.  So let me have first look.  Sir,” he continued, addressing the captive, “will you let me ask you a few plain questions, and be free with you?”

“Be free with me?  With all my heart.  I love freedom of all things.  I’m ready to die for freedom; I expect to.  So be free as you please.  What is it?”

“Then, sir, permit me to ask what is your occupation in life—­in time of peace, I mean?”

“You talk like a tax-gatherer,” rejoined Allen, squinting diabolically at him; “what is my occupation in life?  Why, in my younger days I studied divinity, but at present I am a conjurer by profession.”

Hereupon everybody laughed, equally at the manner as the words, and the nettled farmer retorted: 

“Conjurer, eh? well, you conjured wrong that time you were taken.”

“Not so wrong, though, as you British did, that time I took Ticonderoga, my friend.”

At this juncture the servant came with the punch, when his master bade him present it to the captive.

“No!—­give it me, sir, with your own hands, and pledge me as gentleman to gentleman.”

“I cannot pledge a state-prisoner, Colonel Allen; but I will hand you the punch with my own hands, since you insist upon it.”

“Spoken and done like a true gentleman, sir; I am bound to you.”

Then receiving the bowl into his gyved hands, the iron ringing against the china, he put it to his lips, and saying, “I hereby give the British nation credit for half a minute’s good usage,” at one draught emptied it to the bottom.

“The rebel gulps it down like a swilling hog at a trough,” here scoffed a lusty private of the guard, off duty.

“Shame to you!” cried the giver of the bowl.

“Nay, sir; his red coat is a standing blush to him, as it is to the whole scarlet-blushing British army.”  Then turning derisively upon the private:  “You object to my way of taking things, do ye?  I fear I shall never please ye.  You objected to the way, too, in which I took Ticonderoga, and the way in which I meant to take Montreal.  Selah!  But pray, now that I look at you, are not you the hero I caught dodging round, in his shirt, in the cattle-pen, inside the fort?  It was the break of day, you remember.”

“Come, Yankee,” here swore the incensed private; “cease this, or I’ll darn your old fawn-skins for ye with the flat of this sword;” for a specimen, laying it lashwise, but not heavily, across the captive’s back.

Turning like a tiger, the giant, catching the steel between his teeth, wrenched it from the private’s grasp, and striking it with his manacles, sent it spinning like a juggler’s dagger into the air, saying, “Lay your dirty coward’s iron on a tied gentleman again, and these,” lifting his handcuffed fists, “shall be the beetle of mortality to you!”

The now furious soldier would have struck him with all his force, but several men of the town interposed, reminding him that it were outrageous to attack a chained captive.

“Ah,” said Allen, “I am accustomed to that, and therefore I am beforehand with them; and the extremity of what I say against Britain, is not meant for you, kind friends, but for my insulters, present and to come.”  Then recognizing among the interposers the giver of the bowl, he turned with a courteous bow, saying, “Thank you again and again, my good sir; you may not be the worse for this; ours is an unstable world; so that one gentleman never knows when it may be his turn to be helped of another.”

But the soldier still making a riot, and the commotion growing general, a superior officer stepped up, who terminated the scene by remanding the prisoner to his cell, dismissing the townspeople, with all strangers, Israel among the rest, and closing the castle gates after them.

 

CHAPTER XXII.

SOMETHING FURTHER OF ETHAN ALLEN; WITH ISRAEL’S FLIGHT TOWARDS THE WILDERNESS.

Among the episodes of the Revolutionary War, none is stranger than that of Ethan Allen in England; the event and the man being equally uncommon.

Allen seems to have been a curious combination of a Hercules, a Joe Miller, a Bayard, and a Tom Hyer; had a person like the Belgian giants; mountain music in him like a Swiss; a heart plump as Coeur de Lion’s.  Though born in New England, he exhibited no trace of her character.  He was frank, bluff, companionable as a Pagan, convivial, a Roman, hearty as a harvest.  His spirit was essentially Western; and herein is his peculiar Americanism; for the Western spirit is, or will yet be (for no other is, or can be), the true American one.

For the most part, Allen’s manner while in England was scornful and ferocious in the last degree; however, qualified by that wild, heroic sort of levity, which in the hour of oppression or peril seems inseparable from a nature like his; the mode whereby such a temper best evinces its barbaric disdain of adversity, and how cheaply and waggishly it holds the malice, even though triumphant, of its foes!  Aside from that inevitable egotism relatively pertaining to pine trees, spires, and giants, there were, perhaps, two special incidental reasons for the Titanic Vermonter’s singular demeanor abroad.  Taken captive while heading a forlorn hope before Montreal, he was treated with inexcusable cruelty and indignity; something as if he had fallen into the hands of the Dyaks.  Immediately upon his capture he would have been deliberately suffered to have been butchered by the Indian allies in cold blood on the spot, had he not, with desperate intrepidity, availed himself of his enormous physical strength, by twitching a British officer to him, and using him for a living target, whirling him round and round against the murderous tomahawks of the savages.  Shortly afterwards, led into the town, fenced about by bayonets of the guard, the commander of the enemy, one Colonel McCloud, flourished his cane over the captive’s head, with brutal insults promising him a rebel’s halter at Tyburn.  During his passage to England in the same ship wherein went passenger Colonel Guy Johnson, the implacable tory, he was kept heavily ironed in the hold, and in all ways treated as a common mutineer; or, it may be, rather as a lion of Asia; which, though caged, was still too dreadful to behold without fear and trembling, and consequent cruelty.  And no wonder, at least for the fear; for on one occasion, when chained hand and foot, he was insulted on shipboard by an officer; with his teeth he twisted off the nail that went through the mortise of his handcuffs, and so, having his arms at liberty, challenged his insulter to combat.  Often, as at Pendennis Castle, when no other avengement was at hand, he would hurl on his foes such howling tempests of anathema as fairly to shock them into retreat.  Prompted by somewhat similar motives, both on shipboard and in England, he would often make the most vociferous allusions to Ticonderoga, and the part he played in its capture, well knowing, that of all American names, Ticonderoga was, at that period, by far the most famous and galling to Englishmen.

Parlor-men, dancing-masters, the graduates of the Albe Bellgarde, may shrug their laced shoulders at the boisterousness of Allen in England.  True, he stood upon no punctilios with his jailers; for where modest gentlemanhood is all on one side, it is a losing affair; as if my Lord Chesterfield should take off his hat, and smile, and bow, to a mad bull, in hopes of a reciprocation of politeness.  When among wild beasts, if they menace you, be a wild beast.  Neither is it unlikely that this was the view taken by Allen.  For, besides the exasperating tendency to self-assertion which such treatment as his must have bred on a man like him, his experience must have taught him, that by assuming the part of a jocular, reckless, and even braggart barbarian, he would better sustain himself against bullying turnkeys than by submissive quietude.  Nor should it be forgotten, that besides the petty details of personal malice, the enemy violated every international usage of right and decency, in treating a distinguished prisoner of war as if he had been a Botany-Bay convict.  If, at the present day, in any similar case between the same States, the repetition of such outrages would be more than unlikely, it is only because it is among nations as among individuals:  imputed indigence provokes oppression and scorn; but that same indigence being risen to opulence, receives a politic consideration even from its former insulters.

As the event proved, in the course Allen pursued, he was right.  Because, though at first nothing was talked of by his captors, and nothing anticipated by himself, but his ignominious execution, or at the least, prolonged and squalid incarceration, nevertheless, these threats and prospects evaporated, and by his facetious scorn for scorn, under the extremest sufferings, he finally wrung repentant usage from his foes; and in the end, being liberated from his irons, and walking the quarter-deck where before he had been thrust into the hold, was carried back to America, and in due time, at New York, honorably included in a regular exchange of prisoners.

It was not without strange interest that Israel had been an eye-witness of the scenes on the Castle Green.  Neither was this interest abated by the painful necessity of concealing, for the present, from his brave countryman and fellow-mountaineer, the fact of a friend being nigh.  When at last the throng was dismissed, walking towards the town with the rest, he heard that there were some forty or more Americans, privates, confined on the cliff.  Upon this, inventing a pretence, he turned back, loitering around the walls for any chance glimpse of the captives.  Presently, while looking up at a grated embrasure in the tower, he started at a voice from it familiarly hailing him: 

“Potter, is that you?  In God’s name how came you here?”

At these words, a sentry below had his eye on our astonished adventurer.  Bringing his piece to bear, he bade him stand.  Next moment Israel was under arrest.  Being brought into the presence of the forty prisoners, where they lay in litters of mouldy straw, strewn with gnawed bones, as in a kennel, he recognized among them one Singles, now Sergeant Singles, the man who, upon our hero’s return home from his last Cape Horn voyage, he had found wedded to his mountain Jenny.  Instantly a rush of emotions filled him.  Not as when Damon found Pythias.  But far stranger, because very different.  For not only had this Singles been an alien to Israel (so far as actual intercourse went), but impelled to it by instinct, Israel had all but detested him, as a successful, and perhaps insidious rival.  Nor was it altogether unlikely that Singles had reciprocated the feeling.  But now, as if the Atlantic rolled, not between two continents, but two worlds—­this, and the next—­these alien souls, oblivious to hate, melted down into one.

At such a juncture, it was hard to maintain a disguise, especially when it involved the seeming rejection of advances like the Sergeant’s.  Still, converting his real amazement into affected surprise, Israel, in presence of the sentries, declared to Singles that he (Singles) must labor under some unaccountable delusion; for he (Potter) was no Yankee rebel, thank Heaven, but a true man to his king; in short, an honest Englishman, born in Kent, and now serving his country, and doing what damage he might to her foes, by being first captain of a carronade on board a letter of marque, that moment in the harbor.

For a moment the captive stood astounded, but observing Israel more narrowly, detecting his latent look, and bethinking him of the useless peril he had thoughtlessly caused to a countryman, no doubt unfortunate as himself, Singles took his cue, and pretending sullenly to apologize for his error, put on a disappointed and crest-fallen air.  Nevertheless, it was not without much difficulty, and after many supplemental scrutinies and inquisitions from a board of officers before whom he was subsequently brought, that our wanderer was finally permitted to quit the cliff.

This luckless adventure not only nipped in the bud a little scheme he had been revolving, for materially befriending Ethan Allen and his comrades, but resulted in making his further stay at Falmouth perilous in the extreme.  And as if this were not enough, next day, while hanging over the side, painting the hull, in trepidation of a visit from the castle soldiers, rumor came to the ship that the man-of-war in the haven purposed impressing one-third of the letter of marque’s crew; though, indeed, the latter vessel was preparing for a second cruise.  Being on board a private armed ship, Israel had little dreamed of its liability to the same governmental hardships with the meanest merchantman.  But the system of impressment is no respecter either of pity or person.

His mind was soon determined.  Unlike his shipmates, braving immediate and lonely hazard, rather than wait for a collective and ultimate one, he cunningly dropped himself overboard the same night, and after the narrowest risk from the muskets of the man-of-war’s sentries (whose gangways he had to pass), succeeded in swimming to shore, where he fell exhausted, but recovering, fled inland, doubly hunted by the thought, that whether as an Englishman, or whether as an American, he would, if caught, be now equally subject to enslavement.

Shortly after the break of day, having gained many miles, he succeeded in ridding himself of his seaman’s clothing, having found some mouldy old rags on the banks of a stagnant pond, nigh a rickety building, which looked like a poorhouse—­clothing not improbably, as he surmised, left there on the bank by some pauper suicide.  Marvel not that he should with avidity seize these rags; what the suicides abandon, the living hug.

Once more in beggar’s garb, the fugitive sped towards London, prompted by the same instinct which impels the hunted fox to the wilderness; for solitudes befriend the endangered wild beast, but crowds are the security, because the true desert, of persecuted man.  Among the things of the capital, Israel for more than forty years was yet to disappear, as one entering at dusk into a thick wood.  Nor did ever the German forest, nor Tasso’s enchanted one, contain in its depths more things of horror than eventually were revealed in the secret clefts, gulfs, caves and dens of London.

But here we anticipate a page.

 

CHAPTER XXIII.

ISRAEL IN EGYPT.

It was a gray, lowering afternoon that, worn out, half starved, and haggard, Israel arrived within some ten or fifteen miles of London, and saw scores and scores of forlorn men engaged in a great brickyard.

For the most part, brickmaking is all mud and mire.  Where, abroad, the business is carried on largely, as to supply the London market, hordes of the poorest wretches are employed, their grimy tatters naturally adapting them to an employ where cleanliness is as much out of the question as with a drowned man at the bottom of the lake in the Dismal Swamp.

Desperate with want, Israel resolved to turn brickmaker, nor did he fear to present himself as a stranger, nothing doubting that to such a vocation his rags would be accounted the best letters of introduction.

To be brief, he accosted one of the many surly overseers, or taskmasters of the yard, who, with no few pompous airs, finally engaged him at six shillings a week, almost equivalent to a dollar and a half.  He was appointed to one of the mills for grinding up the ingredients.  This mill stood in the open air.  It was of a rude, primitive, Eastern aspect, consisting of a sort of hopper, emptying into a barrel-shaped receptacle.  In the barrel was a clumsy machine turned round at its axis by a great bent beam, like a well-sweep, only it was horizontal; to this beam, at its outer end, a spavined old horse was attached.  The muddy mixture was shovelled into the hopper by spavined-looking old men, while, trudging wearily round and round, the spavined old horse ground it all up till it slowly squashed out at the bottom of the barrel, in a doughy compound, all ready for the moulds.  Where the dough squeezed out of the barrel a pit was sunken, so as to bring the moulder here stationed down to a level with the trough, into which the dough fell.  Israel was assigned to this pit.  Men came to him continually, reaching down rude wooden trays, divided into compartments, each of the size and shape of a brick.  With a flat sort of big ladle, Israel slapped the dough into the trays from the trough; then, with a bit of smooth board, scraped the top even, and handed it up.  Half buried there in the pit, all the time handing those desolate trays, poor Israel seemed some gravedigger, or churchyard man, tucking away dead little innocents in their coffins on one side, and cunningly disinterring them again to resurrectionists stationed on the other.

Twenty of these melancholy old mills were in operation.  Twenty heartbroken old horses, rigged out deplorably in cast-off old cart harness, incessantly tugged at twenty great shaggy beams; while from twenty half-burst old barrels, twenty wads of mud, with a lava-like course, gouged out into twenty old troughs, to be slapped by twenty tattered men into the twenty-times-twenty battered old trays.

Ere entering his pit for the first, Israel had been struck by the dismally devil-may-care gestures of the moulders.  But hardly had he himself been a moulder three days, when his previous sedateness of concern at his unfortunate lot, began to conform to the reckless sort of half jolly despair expressed by the others.  The truth indeed was, that this continual, violent, helter-skelter slapping of the dough into the moulds, begat a corresponding disposition in the moulder, who, by heedlessly slapping that sad dough, as stuff of little worth, was thereby taught, in his meditations, to slap, with similar heedlessness, his own sadder fortunes, as of still less vital consideration.  To these muddy philosophers, men and bricks were equally of clay.  “What signifies who we be—­dukes or ditchers?” thought the moulders; “all is vanity and clay.”

So slap, slap, slap, care-free and negligent, with bitter unconcern, these dismal desperadoes flapped down the dough.  If this recklessness were vicious of them, be it so; but their vice was like that weed which but grows on barren ground; enrich the soil, and it disappears.

For thirteen weary weeks, lorded over by the taskmaster, Israel toiled in his pit.  Though this condemned him to a sort of earthy dungeon, or gravedigger’s hole, while he worked, yet even when liberated to his meals, naught of a cheery nature greeted him.  The yard was encamped, with all its endless rows of tented sheds, and kilns, and mills, upon a wild waste moor, belted round by bogs and fens.  The blank horizon, like a rope, coiled round the whole.

Sometimes the air was harsh and bleak; the ridged and mottled sky looked scourged, or cramping fogs set in from sea, for leagues around, ferreting out each rheumatic human bone, and racking it; the sciatic limpers shivered; their aguish rags sponged up the mists.  No shelter, though it hailed.  The sheds were for the bricks.  Unless, indeed, according to the phrase, each man was a “brick,” which, in sober scripture, was the case; brick is no bad name for any son of Adam; Eden was but a brickyard; what is a mortal but a few luckless shovelfuls of clay, moulded in a mould, laid out on a sheet to dry, and ere long quickened into his queer caprices by the sun?  Are not men built into communities just like bricks into a wall?  Consider the great wall of China:  ponder the great populace of Pekin.  As man serves bricks, so God him, building him up by billions into edifices of his purposes.  Man attains not to the nobility of a brick, unless taken in the aggregate.  Yet is there a difference in brick, whether quick or dead; which, for the last, we now shall see.

 

CHAPTER XXIV.

CONTINUED.

All night long, men sat before the mouth of the kilns, feeding them with fuel.  A dull smoke—­a smoke of their torments—­went up from their tops.  It was curious to see the kilns under the action of the fire, gradually changing color, like boiling lobsters.  When, at last, the fires would be extinguished, the bricks being duly baked, Israel often took a peep into the low vaulted ways at the base, where the flaming fagots had crackled.  The bricks immediately lining the vaults would be all burnt to useless scrolls, black as charcoal, and twisted into shapes the most grotesque; the next tier would be a little less withered, but hardly fit for service; and gradually, as you went higher and higher along the successive layers of the kiln, you came to the midmost ones, sound, square, and perfect bricks, bringing the highest prices; from these the contents of the kiln gradually deteriorated in the opposite direction, upward.  But the topmost layers, though inferior to the best, by no means presented the distorted look of the furnace-bricks.  The furnace-bricks were haggard, with the immediate blistering of the fire—­the midmost ones were ruddy with a genial and tempered glow—­the summit ones were pale with the languor of too exclusive an exemption from the burden of the blaze.

These kilns were a sort of temporary temples constructed in the yard, each brick being set against its neighbor almost with the care taken by the mason.  But as soon as the fire was extinguished, down came the kiln in a tumbled ruin, carted off to London, once more to be set up in ambitious edifices, to a true brickyard philosopher, little less transient than the kilns.

Sometimes, lading out his dough, Israel could not but bethink him of what seemed enigmatic in his fate.  He whom love of country made a hater of her foes—­the foreigners among whom he now was thrown—­he who, as soldier and sailor, had joined to kill, burn and destroy both them and theirs—­here he was at last, serving that very people as a slave, better succeeding in making their bricks than firing their ships.  To think that he should be thus helping, with all his strength, to extend the walls of the Thebes of the oppressor, made him half mad.  Poor Israel! well-named—­bondsman in the English Egypt.  But he drowned the thought by still more recklessly spattering with his ladle:  “What signifies who we be, or where we are, or what we do?” Slap-dash!  “Kings as clowns are codgers—­who ain’t a nobody?” Splash!  “All is vanity and clay.”

 

CHAPTER XXV.

IN THE CITY OF DIS.

At the end of his brickmaking, our adventurer found himself with a tolerable suit of clothes—­somewhat darned—­on his back, several blood-blisters in his palms, and some verdigris coppers in his pocket.  Forthwith, to seek his fortune, he proceeded on foot to the capital, entering, like the king, from Windsor, from the Surrey side.

It was late on a Monday morning, in November—­a Blue Monday—­a Fifth of November—­Guy Fawkes’ Day!—­very blue, foggy, doleful and gunpowdery, indeed, as shortly will be seen, that Israel found himself wedged in among the greatest everyday crowd which grimy London presents to the curious stranger:  that hereditary crowd—­gulf-stream of humanity—­which, for continuous centuries, has never ceased pouring, like an endless shoal of herring, over London Bridge.

At the period here written of, the bridge, specifically known by that name, was a singular and sombre pile, built by a cowled monk—­Peter of Colechurch—­some five hundred years before.  Its arches had long been crowded at the sides with strange old rookeries of disproportioned and toppling height, converting the bridge at once into the most densely occupied ward and most jammed thoroughfare of the town, while, as the skulls of bullocks are hung out for signs to the gateways of shambles, so the withered heads and smoked quarters of traitors, stuck on pikes, long crowned the Southwark entrance.

Though these rookeries, with their grisly heraldry, had been pulled down some twenty years prior to the present visit, still enough of grotesque and antiquity clung to the structure at large to render it the most striking of objects, especially to one like our hero, born in a virgin clime, where the only antiquities are the forever youthful heavens and the earth.

On his route from Brentford to Paris, Israel had passed through the capital, but only as a courier; so that now, for the first time, he had time to linger, and loiter, and lounge—­slowly absorb what he saw—­meditate himself into boundless amazement.  For forty years he never recovered from that surprise—­never, till dead, had done with his wondering.

Hung in long, sepulchral arches of stone, the black, besmoked bridge seemed a huge scarf of crape, festooning the river across.  Similar funeral festoons spanned it to the west, while eastward, towards the sea, tiers and tiers of jetty colliers lay moored, side by side, fleets of black swans.

The Thames, which far away, among the green fields of Berks, ran clear as a brook, here, polluted by continual vicinity to man, curdled on between rotten wharves, one murky sheet of sewerage.  Fretted by the ill-built piers, awhile it crested and hissed, then shot balefully through the Erebus arches, desperate as the lost souls of the harlots, who, every night, took the same plunge.  Meantime, here and there, like awaiting hearses, the coal-scows drifted along, poled broadside, pell-mell to the current.

And as that tide in the water swept all craft on, so a like tide seemed hurrying all men, all horses, all vehicles on the land.  As ant-hills, the bridge arches crawled with processions of carts, coaches, drays, every sort of wheeled, rumbling thing, the noses of the horses behind touching the backs of the vehicles in advance, all bespattered with ebon mud—­ebon mud that stuck like Jews’ pitch.  At times the mass, receiving some mysterious impulse far in the rear, away among the coiled thoroughfares out of sight, would, start forward with a spasmodic surge.  It seemed as if some squadron of centaurs, on the thither side of Phlegethon, with charge on charge, was driving tormented humanity, with all its chattels, across.

Whichever way the eye turned, no tree, no speck of any green thing was seen—­no more than in smithies.  All laborers, of whatsoever sort, were hued like the men in foundries.  The black vistas of streets were as the galleries in coal mines; the flagging, as flat tomb-stones, minus the consecration of moss, and worn heavily down, by sorrowful tramping, as the vitreous rocks in the cursed Gallipagos, over which the convict tortoises crawl.

As in eclipses, the sun was hidden; the air darkened; the whole dull, dismayed aspect of things, as if some neighboring volcano, belching its premonitory smoke, were about to whelm the great town, as Herculaneum and Pompeii, or the Cities of the Plain.  And as they had been upturned in terror towards the mountain, all faces were more or less snowed or spotted with soot.  Nor marble, nor flesh, nor the sad spirit of man, may in this cindery City of Dis abide white.

As retired at length, midway, in a recess of the bridge, Israel surveyed them, various individual aspects all but frighted him.  Knowing not who they were; never destined, it may be, to behold them again; one after the other, they drifted by, uninvoked ghosts in Hades.  Some of the wayfarers wore a less serious look; some seemed hysterically merry; but the mournful faces had an earnestness not seen in the others:  because man, “poor player,” succeeds better in life’s tragedy than comedy.

Arrived, in the end, on the Middlesex side, Israel’s heart was prophetically heavy; foreknowing, that being of this race, felicity could never be his lot.

For five days he wandered and wandered.  Without leaving statelier haunts unvisited, he did not overlook those broader areas—­hereditary parks and manors of vice and misery.  Not by constitution disposed to gloom, there was a mysteriousness in those impulses which led him at this time to rovings like these.  But hereby stoic influences were at work, to fit him at a soon-coming day for enacting a part in the last extremities here seen; when by sickness, destitution, each busy ill of exile, he was destined to experience a fate, uncommon even to luckless humanity—­a fate whose crowning qualities were its remoteness from relief and its depth of obscurity—­London, adversity, and the sea, three Armageddons, which, at one and the same time, slay and secrete their victims.