“ ‘At the end of this alley was a court and beyond that a very respectable square. This last I found to be empty when I broke into it well ahead now of the wolf pack. I knew that men would not walk abroad in a square like this, if they could possibly avoid it, as it was in the plague quarter, for I noticed a door here and there with a cross on the outside to warn people away. Then I discovered a piece of really good fortune; a large house at the far corner, screened from the alley I had entered by owing to laurel bushes growing thick in the centre garden. The luck was not so much that I had found a wealthy-looking mansion, but that its front door was by mistake or some purpose left ajar. I paused in front of the flight of steps to get my breath, and then heard the crowd in the alley and court on the farther side of the square. Well—neck or nothing—I could certainly run no more. I was dead beat. I ripped off my neckercher, soaked it with my blood—and God, how I had bled—and then quickly daubed a red cross upon the great oak door. Then I pushed it open and closed it behind me. One thing was certain—my pursuers would avoid a plague-marked house. Now the hall into which I had trespassed was of some estate—the property of some rich City merchant—no doubt a worthy alderman or burgher, anyway rich enough—for no sooner had I closed the door on my pursuers and was listening to them scampering down the turning at the side of the house, than a most important-looking serving-man in gorgeous livery entered the hall from the double-doors of the dining-room, in which I could see the large table being set out for dinner. I could see the white linen table-cloth which happened to be exactly the thing of all others that I most desired. Now for the last scene, I told myself, conjuring up my remaining strength—the fight at the curtain of the play and then applause—from myself, of course, as there would be no audience I hoped—and then a long rest—no not in my theatre dressing-room, but almost as good, the cold cobblestones outside. But I am jumping too fast ahead of your kind comprehensions. I flung myself upon the astounded serving-man who went down before me like Young Siward with Macbeth, and I quickly and most efficiently gagged him with his own wig, forcing it half down his astonished gaping gullet and securing same with a frog-cord I ripped from his fancy uniform. I then repeated this business with two other of his frog-cords torn from the scarlet coat—and with these I tied his feet and hands, before pushing him bodily into the case of a great clock that was ticking ruefully the unhappy minutes that had so suddenly descended upon the house for which it conducted time. The case had a key. I turned it on him—pulled out the key and threw it into the hall fire-place. It was a strange thing that I had often considered the possibility of a clock-case being used as a hiding in a case of emergency. The serving-man disposed of, I then went into the dining-room which was fortunately empty of any human being, and sweeping the silver plate and glasses from the table, I grabbed the white cloth, rending the costly lace from its border. I stripped off my coat and shirt, the latter being by now saturated with my blood, pulled off my boots and hose, and shame to say, my breeches. Then, covering my nakedness with my white linen table-cloth shroud, I went back into the hall.
“ ‘My pursuers had been baffled at my disappearance, but had come back to the square and were actually hammering at the door of the next house. This was eventually opened by someone none too pleased, for I heard high words between the officer and an angry inmate with a high-pitched female voice. The door banged-to again, and then I heard them come up the steps of the house that I was in.
“ ‘That they were terrified of infection was plain, for none of them was willing even to touch the door on which a red cross had been newly fixed. But at last one bolder than the rest cried out stoutly that he cared not, for was there not money enough on Master Gabond’s head to compensate him for any risk he ran?
“ ‘Now I had no intention of letting him knock upon the door and arouse the inmates whom I expected to see at any minute. Besides it was possible that the prisoner in the clock might free himself sufficiently to cry out. So turning the latch, I opened the door quickly, and just sufficiently to let my body tumble out, contriving as I fell on the steps to slam it behind me as though someone had been glad to get rid of a plague corpse. As it happened, I rolled into the man who was coming up the steps to knock and, my faith, I have never seen anyone so surprised, for he lost his balance, as he cried out in terror, and down we went together upon the cruel cobbles. The mob was immediately thrown into the wildest panic, for all they had seen from below was a naked man in a shroud thrust round the door into the street.
“ ‘I kept my eyes open all the time—I quite forgot to close them—but I believe that only served to frighten them the more, for they were out of that square like a pack of rats leaving a doomed vessel.
“ ‘And now—would you believe it?—but I lay on those cobblestones for hours and nobody heeded me. Those who might have done, passed hurriedly by on the other side, for corpses were common enough in the streets those days.
“ ‘I was very weak from loss of blood and my gruelling race for life, and I must have fainted, because I could remember nothing more till nightfall, and it was a strange awakening I had too, a rumble of a heavy cart and a weird wailing, impersonal voice wailing that ghastly addition to the London street cries, “Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!”
“ ‘I heard it as though in a dream till somebody kicked me over on my back, for I was in the track of the great wheels, and then I was lifted up.
“ ‘Thank God for the darkness that had fallen, or I might have been discovered; but the dead-carriers did not linger over their grisly work in the days of the Great Plague. Besides, they could see very little by the light of their evil-smelling torches. But it was not the torches that stank, as I was soon to discover. The stench came from within the cart.
“ ‘As I said, I had been lifted up; in fact, they were already swinging me backwards and forwards, and I was expecting my terrible plunge amidst the dead, when one of the wretches noticed the fine texture of the table-cloth. I was accordingly dumped down again in the foul gutter, while those carnivorous vultures produced dice and threw hazards for my winding-sheet. As far as I could judge, the driver won, for I saw him later wrapped up in it upon the lofty box-seat—a weird, grotesque figure—a well-selected coachman for such travellers as those who rode within the cart.
“ ‘As those, do I say? I should have said as we, for was not I the moving spirit in that ghastly coaching party? No man, I think, can reasonably call me a coward. I have looked Death straight in the eyes a score of times and kept a firm upper lip. I have never been ashamed of my behaviour when face to face with Death; but this was more than face to face, if I may joke upon it; for here was I, thrown stark naked into a heap of corpses, the most of which were half-putrid. Just you picture for an instant the sight that I enjoyed within that cart with its tall sides. The torches stuck in the iron slots behind the driver’s seat gave me a hellish light, flickering and flaring as we bumped our way over the jaunty cobblestones. Sometimes when the road was clear the driver would crack his whip and the horse would put on speed, regardless of the creaks and bumps. And as the corpses bobbed about, I knew I should go mad. Things that had been men; things that had been women and children; and now the cast-aside victims of that raging Plague; no stitch of clothing upon their rotten bodies—the carriers had seen to that—they jostled and jumped upon me at every jolting of the cart. Then we would stop at houses to take up more of the terrible passengers; and what a nightmare it was when each new body was roughly pushed over the black sides of that beastly cart. Some were flung high up into the air and would crash down upon us, half-burying me in the horrors. This was evidently an amusement amongst the carriers, for they would laugh and clap their rough hands, when they had tossed one higher than usual. They would have done more than laugh if they had been lying on their backs amidst the crew, and watching the dead bodies rained upon them from the night sky. Sometimes a body thus treated would miss its aim and fall on the side of the cart, and then it would break on the rough splintered wood
and we—I and my dead companions—would be sadly bespattered. And then their wreckage would follow, in several pieces, and join the jolting dance.
“ ‘I cunningly contrived to keep to the edge of the cart, so that the new arrivals would slip from me as we rode; sometimes a limb coming away in the process. But sometimes the pile would mount up in the centre, and the very first jolt would avalanche them down upon me.
“ ‘Can you fancy an avalanche of dead?
“ ‘How many travelling companions were thrust upon me, I know not. By that time I must have been mad—but presently we reached the pit and the unloading began.
“ ‘I could see this pit through a chink in the cart, and I wondered when my turn would come to be shot in. I had forgotten by that time that I was alive—I thought I was like the rest of them.
“ ‘The back of the cart was suddenly tilted up and we slid off on to the ground, or rather the first lot fell on the ground and we fell on the top of them, whilst others in their turn fell on the top of us, and effectually covered us up.
“ ‘And then they began pushing us into the pit with great pronged sticks like forks.
“ ‘There was a leg in front of me, and until its owner was shot over the brink I could not see into the pit. But at last I did—and at the sight of that terrible hell my strength returned.
“ ‘With a yell for battle I arose, throwing the bodies from me, and there I stood amongst the dead, facing the terrified carriers. They stared at me in horror, and I, slowly opening my mouth till I thought the corners of my lips would split, uttered the most ghastly shriek that mortal man has surely ever heard produced. Perhaps I am wrong to call it a shriek, for it was a kind of cough, but so loud and piercing that my whole system seemed to be shaken. A medical friend has since told me that this same rending revulsion that tore its way through my physique must have saved my life by expelling in one effort all the contagion that must have seeped into me during my ride in the Plague cart.
“ ‘The carriers, of course, fled—all save one. This creature was standing too near the slippery pit-brink, and without a cry he lost his balance and disappeared amongst the dead. I believe the force of my shout had pushed him backwards. And then I did go raving mad. I was alone on the brink with the dead. Alone save for the horse in the cart, who was used to horrors, poor beast, and didn’t know what to do. Perhaps he didn’t care.
“ ‘The carrier had come to the surface and was squealing like the hog he was. I rent off limbs from the bodies I had ridden with and pelted him hard. God knows what horrors I was not guilty of—but—oh—the last horror I remember only too well. Even now when I awake in the night I scream out at the thought of it.
“ ‘I unharnessed the horse—for I had need of him—and I pushed the heavy cart over the brink, and I heard the squelch of it cutting through the massed bodies as its great weight carried it down beneath the muddy, bloody, filth-clogged liquid, for the heavy rains had swollen the ditches in the midst of which the pit had been hastily but deeply cut.
“ ‘Now whether it was that my brain had gone or whether it was really a fact, I know not; I only know what I saw—whether mentally or actually—and I tell you that at the noise of that mud-jellied squelch, a tide of matter—of poisonous, putrescent matter, rose rapidly to the very brink of the pit, and as it lapped and gushed over my bare feet, I saw the carrier trying to swim, but utterly unable to make any headway towards the bank. I had stuck one of the torches in the mud in order to see to the horse—the others had gone hissing down in their sockets of the cart, and it was by that weird light that the carrier’s eyes met mine and realized that there was no help to be got from me.
“ ‘But the horror of his face made me leap on to the horse, which, God be praised, was now as frightened as I and made immediately a mad rush—a fierce gallop away from those accursed fields, for we were both in the grip of terror which pursued us with the sound of the treble gurgling of that drowning man.
“ ‘At any rate, we rode till I can remember no more. Oh, the thing in my memory was the silhouetted shape of Old Paul’s; now, I hear, a burned-out mass. I rode till I was a squealing, gibbering idiot: where I rode I cannot say after that, except that I had galloped well into that illness from which it has taken me three years to recover.
“ ‘Well, gentlemen, Plague-ridden London has been destroyed by fire while I lay unconscious, and I dare swear that the warrant for my arrest was burnt with thousands of other less important documents. Well—no doubt they’ll have to make out a good many fresh ones before they’ve done with me, but the authorities were never so near to catching me. Perhaps I should say “God bless the Plague,” but no—I would rather take my bow at Tyburn than go through such an escape again. And that, gentlemen, is my story, which I believe our friend Billie Butcher is down to beat.’
“ ‘Master Gabond,’ cried the gentleman in question and a notorious house-breaker, by the way, ‘I cannot beat it and I will not try, but I can and will complete it, for you have solved for me a great mystery, which with the President’s leave I will tell you instead of the personal adventure I had planned to give. God knows this mystery was personal enough, for it frightened me more than the black knocker of Newgate.
“ ‘One night during the Plague I was drinking with a lot of gibbering cowards in a tavern of Cheapside. I confess that I was not putting a very brave front upon things myself, and I shivered in my soul as they did when we looked through the casement at the deserted streets, that stank of foul weeds and rotting vegetables. Row upon row of plague-stricken houses. No noise but the rattle of the dead-carts, and nothing to do but pray and drink. I drank: for it was too risky to rob. Presently we hear the noise of a galloping horse. We pressed close to the window, expecting to hear an official crying out some news or announcement: for even the City Criers rode and rode fast through the infected quarters. Gone were the days and nights of the watchman and leisurely beadle.
“ ‘Nearer and nearer came the rider, till right outside the tavern a steed was pulled up on its haunches. A mad-looking creature it was, too, but not so terrifying as its rider, who sat bare-backed on his crazy horse, and was himself as naked as Adam before the Fall. He was a fine rider, for he spun the animal round at the window and made it crash down the glass with his pawing fore-hooves. The catch broke and the shattered casement swung in and fell at our feet. We leapt back for safety as the rider lolled over the sill and cried for drink in the Devil’s name. With black terror in my heart I handed the Thing a mug of raw spirits, which he took at a gulp, hurled the mug at my head and dashed on. That was all. But I have often sought for some explanation other than just a drunkard’s imagination, and I am your debtor, Master Gabond, for having given it to me.’
“Another member sprang to his feet, a timid-looking individual in spite of being the quickest and highest feed lock-picker employed by the house-breakers’ community. He was rich, too, from his legal City business of locksmith.
“ ‘You all know me, Joe Sunderland of London Wall,’ he cried. ‘My word is my bond, whether I undertake to build a lock or break one. And I’ll be hanged, drawn and quartered if I don’t give you the sequel to these two yarns.
“ ‘I have always maintained that a good locksmith should first be apprenticed to the clock makers’ trade. My family has had both trades for generations. Now in the Plague-time nothing suffered like the clocks of the City. Journeymen winders and repairers neglected their business, and the City clocks ran down. Most of the journeymen took one journey—to the country, and stayed there for their health. Then came the Fire. Clocks got burnt, same as everything else, and those that had one left took a pride in ’em, as they were at a premium. As you know, some fine houses escaped the Fire and it was to one of these in an old square that I was called in to repair the locks and oil ’em up. The rich burgher who paid me asked if I would unpick the lock of a clock-case in the hall. The key, which he said was of silver, had been stolen. He blamed one of his serving-men, who had disappeared with his wife’
s best linen table-cloth. He had taken the thing after wantonly ripping off the valuable lace border, which proved him a fool. He had left the costly plate and many other things of great value, and decamped, no doubt afraid of the infection, with just that one piece of property. He had also stolen his livery, but left behind the rest of his clothes.
“ ‘I found the livery when I opened the clock-case. It adorned his dead body. Not a pretty sight, my masters. A wig jutted out of his mouth, like an actor’s beard badly put on. It was tied with a piece of gold cord. So were his feet and his hands. No—not intentional murder, I think. Shall we say manslaughter in self-defence? Anyhow, it could be brought in as committed when the assailant was not in his right mind. The mystery that concerned the householder most was not the man’s death, but what he had done with the fair linen cloth. And even I with my clockwork mind could never piece that together. I thank you, Master Gabond, for having put my mind at rest.’
“ ‘I cannot return the compliment, Master Sunderland,’ replied Gabond ruefully, ‘for you have put mine ill at ease. With my record, I fear it would be a hanging business.’
“ ‘If it were known,’ put in the locksmith.
“The President rose and looked round the room, as though summing up the honesty of those present—a somewhat doubtful task. But at last he smiled as though well satisfied and, turning to his right-hand neighbour, said with great assurance, ‘You can take it from me, Master Gabond, that it never will be known outside the circle of this exclusive Club.’ The name of that president was William Wycherley. Very young to be a president of any club. Only twenty-nine. That is, of course, if it happens to be our William Wycherley who wrote plays for Drury Lane.”
The Master of the Macabre Page 10
