by Unknown
“He recognized Suffrenes Casselman. And he said the head man was called Caldwell.”
5
JOHN WOLFF’S JOURNEY (1777)
1. The Cavern
John Wolff had been in Newgate Prison for over a year, but he wasn’t sure himself how long it was. He seemed to have lost the sense of time.
There were days when he couldn’t have said offhand whether it was to-day, or yesterday; they were days beyond track.
Sometimes he would catch himself saying the days of the week, “Mon-day, Tuesday, Wednesday …” Or the months of the year. There were many things he used to say. “Lucy Locket, lost her pocket …” Sometimes he would wake up some of the near-by prisoners and they would throw odd pieces of rock at his bed and yell. It was awful when the men yelled. It started the echoes whirling in the high air shaft, seventy feet high. It was fifty feet across at the bottom, they said, though you couldn’t find that out by pacing because the water lapped against the far side. But at the top the shaft was four feet across with an iron grating fixed into the stone; and what with the smoke from the charcoal braziers one could hardly tell where the sun was in the sky, except at noon. A little before and a little after summer solstice, you could see the sun itself upon the grating if you waded out into the water far enough. You could even imagine a faint warmth from it on your head. John Wolff had felt it, and the next man, walking out, felt it also, but he started a convulsion, and they had to haul him out of the water for fear he would drown.
But when the men started yelling and got the echoes going, it used to make John Wolff feel sick. The voices would start picking each other up, catching and passing each other, and coming up and down, until the echoes managed to acquire individual personality of their own, having echoes of their own, and the echoes had echoes, and it went on and on, a bedlam that wouldn’t die even when the trapdoor opened above the iron ladder and the guard looked down and yelled back furiously. Then the men would work on the echoes and a queer singsong rise and fall would be worked out that, even after everyone was tired, kept the echoes working endlessly.
It was like the eternal drip of water magnified. The drip of water had the same effect, when everyone was silent. At first you would notice it on the wall right beside you. Drip, and a pause; drip, and a pause. Gradually this soft impingement of a single drop would lead you to listen for drops farther away, and soon your ears would become attuned to drops much farther off. Then you would begin to be aware of the graduation of loudness that distance made, and all at once the drop you had first noticed would have the regular clang of a ringing bell. You couldn’t then put it back into its proper equivalent in the sound of sense.
Sometimes a man would get up from his wet straw and work at the bare rock for hours to change the direction of an individual drip, so that its sound would be altered and thus restored to a sane proportion.
But one night when the men were making their singsong, it happened that the guard was drunk. Maybe the guard went a little crazy himself. Anyway, he opened the trap and fired his musket. They could all see him, fifty feet above their heads in the lighted square of the trap, his furious red face, and the musket pointing down like the finger of wrathful ret-ribution. The bullet striking made no sound through the yelling voices and they yelled twice as loud. Even John Wolff yelled that night. And the guard lost his head entirely. He fired again and again, and finally a ball ricocheted and killed one of the prisoners. He was the man who had come in with John Wolff, the man who had beaten a soldier for molesting his wife.
But they did not notice he had died till it was time for them to go up the next day.
They had to haul him up with a rope and carry him to the smithy so that his irons could be taken off. Then he had been buried, and the commandant, Captain Viets, in a fury, had had half a dozen men flogged, choosing the ones the outraged guard who had committed the murder pointed out, and one man, who owed the guard three shillings, was hung by his heels for an hour and a half. Nobody had had any food for two days, but the guard did well instead, for it was necessary for the prison to consume its full ration of beef if the commandant were to receive his regular allowance.
It was odd, after that, to think of the dead man. He was buried in the prison yard. And yet he was sixty feet above any of his fellow prisoners. He was decomposing somewhere underground, but they were still more underground than he. Waiting for him to come down, one man said: “to come down in drops of water.” He embarked on an intricate calculation of how long it would take the first drop to come down to their level. John Wolff started watching the drops on the stone beside his bed.
Now and then long firey discussions would start up over the progress of the British army. They all knew one was on the way. But the guard would give them no news. The guard struck a man if he asked. They gathered from that that the army was making progress. But one night the commandant himself opened the trap and they saw his bare legs squatting under his nightshirt as he yelled down, Did they want to hear about General Burgoyne? They let the drops answer. But Captain Viets wasn’t to be stopped. “He’s surrendered his entire army. Seven thousand men,” he bawled. “And the Hessians have been licked at Bennington, Vermont, and Sillinger has been driven off from Fort Stanwix by Benedict Arnold. How do you like that? Hey?”
Purely from habit they started their singsong and he had to slam the door shut. They kept the singsong up all night. They knew now that all hope of their being rescued from the caverns must be deferred. In fact it was a question now if they ever would get out. People didn’t even know where they were, a lot of them. They didn’t really know themselves. They were conscious only of the vast formation of rock that was above them. Black tons of it, they thought. A person wouldn’t think of looking for a man so deep down in the rock.
For a week afterwards they beguiled themselves by saying what they thought of General Burgoyne. They imagined General Burgoyne if he were put down among them. They wondered if he would be. But people like General Burgoyne, who made war and brought Indians and wore epaulets and carried his private whiskey with him, weren’t ever put in places like this. Only a person who preached in the pulpit for the King, or who said he was a Loyalist, or who owed a new Yankee judge some money, or who hit a soldier who was raping his wife only that man was an atrocious villain.
2. The Drainage Level
Most of them thought John Wolff was going crazy. He was not aware of it himself. Only he liked to repeat things he knew. And he also dictated to himself letters to his wife every week, though he hadn’t money to smuggle them out if he had been able to write them. He would ask her to write what she was doing and then he would say what had happened in the prison. The letters sounded pretty much alike even to himself. He got tired of them. The day after the captain delivered the news of Burgoyne’s surrender, he wrote Ally about it; but then he could think of nothing to add. The Mr. Henry who had first welcomed him to the caverns asked what the trouble was. “I’m writing my wife, Alice,” explained John Wolff, “but I can’t think of anything new to tell her.”
“Have you described this lovely home of ours?” said Mr. Henry.
“No, I haven’t.”
“Why don’t you? Take a look around and see what there is to see.”
Several men laughed, but John Wolff did not mind. It was an idea. He began looking round and made up his letter, about the air shaft and the beds and the queer beach of sand and the water. “The water is queer,” he said, “the water keeps dropping down off the walls all the while and the water don’t never get higher nor lower.” He realized that he was saying something nobody had noticed.
Suddenly John Wolff came out of his daze and he had a long fit of the shakes. But they were not the damp shakes that everybody had. He was shaking with excitement. He went and looked at the water.
He said, “Has anybody ever tried to wade out there?”
“It’s too deep,” one of the men said.
“Has anybody tried to swim?” asked John Wolff.
Then his eyes grew cunning. He felt them growing so and closed the lids lest the other men should see it, and he went and lay down. They were still making jokes about him when the guard opened the door and shouted at them to “Heave up!” for their exercise.
From his bed, John Wolff watched them clambering toilsomely up the ladder, their chains clashing against the iron rungs, as they fought upward with one hand and carried the night buckets with the other. The smoke from the braziers drew into the guardroom and the guard stepped away from the door. John Wolff lay there till they had all gone up.
“Hey, you!” the guard yelled. “What’s your name, Wolff!”
John Wolff didn’t answer.
“Come up.”
John Wolff remembered all the filth he had ever heard and sent it up to the guard. The guard laughed. “All right,” he said. “Stay down. Stay down for a week.” Wolff was a harmless man, not worth coming down for and lugging up and flogging. He slammed the trap shut.
John Wolff got up. He clanked slowly down to the beach, looking at the water. Then he started rummaging in the straw beds. Some of the prisoners had bought pieces of plank from the guard, to put under the straw. He hadn’t any himself because they cost a shilling a foot. Moving with the slow, half-hopping motion the irons forced him to use, he took down planks and put them in the water. They floated soggily. He got more. He laid them on top of each other, side by side. Then he waded out and straddled them and tentatively pulled up his feet. The planks sank under him and he rummaged for more. He finally had enough to float him and he tied them together with strips torn from his blanket.
He straddled the raft and pushed it out with his feet. He paddled with his hands. The weight of the irons made his hands splash no matter how careful he was. But he had only a little way to go to get out of the brazier lights.
John Wolff had thought a long time about which shaft to choose. But as he could not make up his mind he chose the farthest. When he entered it, the noise of his splashing diminished. The light behind him was cir-cumscribed by the low ceiling of the shaft and the flat level of the water. Looking back, it seemed to him that he had come a great distance. He could not see far ahead, because the shaft made a turn. He paddled slowly round that, and then in the darkness that instantly became complete he felt the front of his raft strike the rock. The blow was very slight, but it almost knocked him forward off balance. He barely saved himself by lifting his hands and bracing himself against the rock wall. He realized that the drift was filled to the ceiling, and that there was no way out. He felt all round the water level to make sure and then tried to turn his raft.
There was not room to turn it in the darkness, and he had to back out. It was a laborious and painful process. His arms dragged and his legs had gone cold and numb, except for the ache the cold made in his ankle scars.
When he came back into view of the sand beach and the smouldering braziers and the mussed straw of the beds he had despoiled of planks, he was sobbing with exhaustion. He lay forward along the boards, eyes shut. From a vague sense of habit he started dictating a letter to Ally.
“The right drift is full of water so I can’t get out that way. I shall have to try the other one. It is so hard to paddle.”
Then it occurred to him that he could not wait another day. It would take almost as long to get fifty feet back to shore as to paddle into the next drift. In either case he would not have time to put the planks back under the straw. They ducked men who monkeyed with the beds of others. It took two weeks to get dry.
John decided to paddle into the next drift.
Again the splashing he made seemed to crash against the upward walls of the air shaft. But again the noise was shut off when he finally entered the second drift.
He had been working for an hour to cover his hundred feet or so of progress and the men should be coming down soon. He forced himself to keep at it until the last reflected light of the water was left behind. Then he came to a slight curve and continued round that, and then he stopped.
He had a sudden new sensation. The sweat was pouring out of his skin. It was the first time he had sweated for months. It made him feel weak, as if the whole energy of his body had been put to work at the process of creating sweat in him; but at the same time he felt an access of courage because he was able to sweat.
It gave his hands power to paddle on. Behind, and far away, shut off by the rock wall, he heard the muffled clanking as the men started coming down the ladder. He kept on.
It was dark now, and he was scraping the side of the drift. But he kept paddling. When he heard his name called behind him, the sound was dim and the echoes that entered the drift were mere whispers of his name, John Wolff, John Wolff, like voices for a person departing this world.
His arms lifted and fell and lifted. He had gone a long way. He was not completely conscious any more of what he was doing. He was quite unprepared when the raft struck a projection of the wall, dumping him sideways off the board into the water. His last flurry broke the wrappings of the raft and the boards came apart. He thought he would drown. Then he struck bottom. He stood up and his head came out of water. Against his wet face, in the dark, he felt an icy draft of air.
He started wading. The bottom was quite smooth, but the water deepened. It reached his chin. He knew that he was going in the right direction, because the air still drew against his forehead.
The boards were now out of his reach and it was too dark to see anything, anyway. John Wolff stood still in the water, thinking aloud: “Dear Ally, the water is up to my mouth. It is getting deeper. But there is surely air coming along this drift and I can’t get back and I figure to go ahead. It is better to drown than to stand still in water. It is not very cold water, but it makes me shake some. Otherwise I am well and hoping you are the same… .“He drew a deep breath and took a full stride forward.
The water fell away from his chin, from his throat. He felt the cold air against his wishbone. He drew another breath and took still another step and the water dropped halfway to his waist. He shouted.
It was thin sound and it was drowned by his sudden threshing in the water. All at once he was reaching down, holding tight the chains to his ankles and floundering knee-deep along a narrow stream. The air was cold all over him. He went on for half a dozen yards and shouted again. There was light on the right-hand wall. Faint, but actual light. Daylight. He turned the corner to the left and saw the dazzle on the water which now ran downhill quite fast through a small tunnel that seemed to narrow to the dimension of a large culvert. He had to bend and get on his knees. He took another turn as he dragged himself in the water, and he saw ahead of him the gray of woods in October.
But between him and the woods was a wooden grille.
It shocked and amazed him to find that grille after so long and baffling a distance. It seemed to him a malicious manifestation of the godlessness in man. In its way it seemed to him infinitely more wicked than the trial which had sent him to prison in the first place.
He dragged himself up to it and put his hands against the lower bar and rested his head on his hands. The shakes were getting hold of him again. He closed his eyes, and let go of his body.
He felt the grille shaking as he shook and opened his eyes. It came to him that the wood was old and the joints the crossbars made with the frame were very rotten. He braced his feet against a stone and threw his weight against the grille.
The whole business gave way, tumbling out under him down the steep hillside. He fell with it, with a last clank of his irons, rolled over down the slope, and came to rest with his fac
e upward, seeing the breast of the hill against the sky. He lay still, weeping.
A cold rain was falling steadily.
3. The Hammer
In two hours, he had covered a mile and a half through the woods. He had got beyond caring about the noise he made. Just after sunset he struck a path that led him into a pasture.
The pasture sloped toward a valley through which a road ran. On the road were a small house, with a barn attached to it by a woodshed, and a building that had a chimney and looked like a forge. The wet bricks shone faintly in the light from the house window.
He stopped with the rain beating down on him, and stared at the lighted fire visible through the kitchen window. The whole world smelled wet and cold.
Presently a man came out of the house and went to the barn. John Wolff could hardly credit this good luck as he saw the man lead out a horse and take it to the front door. The man waited there while a woman came out, shawling herself against the rain, and let the man help her onto the pillion. He then mounted in front of her and yelled to someone in the house to bar the door till they came back.
John Wolff could hear the answer in a negro voice. It sounded like a woman’s. The man said they would return in two hours. He kicked the horse to a trot down the road in the rain.
As soon as he was gone, John Wolff started down the hill. He went first to the building he thought might be a smithy and opened the door. There was enough light in the banked fire to show him the anvil and the hammers and files.
He was like a man obsessed. He made no effort to be quiet, but picked up one of the hammers and started striking on the seams of his wrist bands. It was hard to get a good swing. His aim was clumsy from the cold and the hammer head kept rolling off the iron onto his arm. But the seam cracked finally and he pulled the iron loose. For a minute he stood looking at the rusty imprint on his wrist. Then he slowly flexed his arm and raised it over his head. He felt as if his fist could strike high heaven.
