Chapter III: I Escape

Hast thou the nerve to follow me, my friend? My martyrdom was severe, but, after all, brief. Comfort thyself with the thought of the brilliant moth which is to emerge from this sad chrysalis.

My master was an itinerant sweep. He jogged from town to village and from village to town in his little cart, an untaxed Bohemian, and carried me always with him. I had wild weepings at first, and frantic schemes of escape, and fits of sullen rebellion; but they were all persuaded out of me presently by his thick black hand. Then, as the past grew obscured behind me in ever-densifying clouds of soot, I came by degrees provisionally reconciled to my destiny, and even--canst thou believe it?--to some enjoyment of its compensations.

These were its changefulness, its irresponsibility, its little adventures, that always had our bodily solace for their end. We pilfered orchards, snatched an occasional fat duckling from a pond, smoked hives at night and carried away the dripping comb to eat under warm ricks in the moonlight. And I had little to complain of ill-treatment, except when engaged professionally. My master’s ample receptivities laughed and grew fat on self-indulgence. Liquor made him, to my good fortune, beatifically helpless; rich meats, paternally benevolent, and even poetical. It was only in business that he chastised, with a large and incorruptible immorality.

I learned the jargon more readily than I did the practice of my abominable trade. My first ascent of a chimney was a hideous experience--an ascent into hell, reversing all geographical orthodoxy. But my particular devil was a Moloch, who would either be served by exaltation or vindicate his majesty in smoke and fire. He was diplomatic to put me through my first paces, so to speak, in a dismantled vicarage that was in preparation for a new tenant. He simply thrust an iron scraper into my hand, and, with the briefest directions, drove me up. I was refractory, of course; and at that, without wordy persuasion, he lit a brand of tow and applied it to my bare ankles. The pain made me scream and writhe, as he had philosophically counted upon its doing. Involuntarily I found myself ascending the flue, as an awn of barley travels up inside one’s sleeve. The very ease of it made me rebel, and I stopped. Immediately the brand below, flaring at the end of a stick, was lifted to spur me. Frenzied and sobbing, I felt its hot rowel, and struggled on. The soot, with which the chimney was choked, began to fall upon me, half stifling, and filling my pockets. Then self-preservation, the great mother, recalled to me my directions. I looked up, and saw a far eye of light denoting freedom, and I began desperately to scrape clear my passage towards it, letting always the black raff descend between my knees before I rose to take its place. The eye enlarged, and with it grew the dawn of a strange new enthusiasm. I rose to it, like a fish to the angle, as my master had calculated I should. These fiends bait their hooks with heaven.

Suddenly, the last feet were conquered, and I emerged, and saw below me a beautiful village prospect of trees and homesteads.

Did I then sit there and weep? On the contrary, I was radiant. Account for it, thou _fripon_, as thou wilt. Thou knowest, Better the devil to applaud us than none at all. I swear to thee that, for the moment, I coveted nothing but my master’s admiring praise. Breathless as I was, I bent and uttered down the chimney the shrill cry “All up!” as he had bidden me. A little strained laugh came back, and, with an oath of distant approval, a command to descend. But at that, oddly enough, the horror came. I could not stomach the evil pit, with its reeling return into a night from which I had mounted to heaven. My knees trembled beneath me. I sat crying and shivering, while my master stormed thin gusty blasphemy up the flue. At length I remembered my duck-stone. It was in my trousers pocket, safe in its silver case, which, having dropped in the cart, I had found again to my delight lying undiscovered amongst the soot bags. I took it out, let myself down gingerly to the arm-pits, clutched it tightly in my hand, and sniffed, but not vigorously. I awoke to find myself sitting on the hearth, and smiling foolishly into the frightened face of my master. He recovered himself at the moment I did, and was the implacable martinet again and at once.

“Why, you cust little back-slummer!” he said, “to let loose and think to take a chalk of me like that! I’ll larn your nerves!”

And he pulled me to my feet, with his hand raised, but thought better of it, and gave me another chance. Chimney after chimney I must mount, till, fagged and heart-broken, I stood rebellious against his extremest persuasion, and he was obliged, with at least a few healing words of commendation, to postpone the finish of his job.

So began this terror of my new life, and so fortunately ended within a period that was not stretched beyond my endurance.

In this phase of it, after the first, there were no compensations, but only degrees of misery. If my master had ever thought to make capital out of my restoration, he soon abandoned the idea as impracticable, and devoted all his persuasion to turning me, after the inhuman methods of his class, to his best profit. Once I stuck tight in one of those clogged “draw-in bends” which had been fatal to my predecessor. I could move no way, and in my struggles, a little crossed stay of iron, fixed in the chimney, so pressed upon my breast as almost to stop my heart. I was in a dreadful condition of terror and suffering, and in the midst he lit some damp straw on the hearth to smoke me down. The fumes took away my senses, and so, perhaps flattening the resistance of my lungs, released me. But I was in a sort of conscious delirium for days afterwards. Sometimes, where he had got the worst of a housewife’s bargaining, he would shout to me, working two-thirds up, “Pike the lew, boy!” which, in sweep’s jargon, meant, Leave the job unfinished, to spite the old slut! And then I would descend at once. Sometimes, where a cluster of flues ran into one shaft, I would come down into the wrong room, causing consternation amongst its inmates. But, through all, the idea of escape was very early a dead passion in me, so utterly in soot and sexlessness was I lost to any sense of self-identity.

So, always homeless, always enslaved, always wandering, I was one day, some nine months after my abduction, come with my master into the neighbourhood of Streatham, which is a little rural suburb of London, reclaimed, with other contiguous hamlets, from the thick woods and gipsy-haunted commons of that part of the country. For some days past we had moved, unhurriedly as was our wont, through an atmosphere charged with a curious nervous excitement. Housewives, avoiding contact with us, as with possibly compromising emissaries of ill-omen, had vanished into their cottages as we came near; tavern cronies, grouped at tap-doors, were to be seen looking citywards, until dark, tramping up the long white roads, drove them within with unreasonable frights of shapeless things approaching. Then, sure enough, the night horizon grew patched with flaring cressets, and we learned that London was in the hands of a No-Popery mob.

Its area of destruction spreading like an unchecked ink-blot, and we moving to meet it, brought us presently involved in the fringe of the disorder. Protestant Dulwich had sent its contingent to help petition Parliament against the legalising of the poor harried Catholics, and had got its warrant, as it chose to consider, for an anti-Romish crusade. And for that, whether right or wrong, I, at least, owe it gratitude.

We were rolling one afternoon along a certain Knight’s Hill or road which skirted a stretch of common, when we came upon a great inn, called The Horns, where was a considerable concourse of people assembled, all in blue cockades, and buzzing like a hive about to swarm. The word most in the mouths of this draff was Pope, which at first we took to mean the Vicar of Rome, but soon understood for the name of a young Jesuit who was lately come as chaplain to a Catholic family of the neighbourhood. Now, such insolent defiance of the penal laws was not to be tolerated, and so the loyal Protestant burghers of Dulwich were going, with no disrespect to the family, to cast down its graven images, and hang up its chaplain for a scarecrow to all propagandists who should venture out of the Holy See into our tight little island. And here they were gathered to organise themselves, the process taking good account of malt liquors; and hence, when they moved off, we, to cut the story short, accompanied them walking, foreseeing some prospect of “swag” in the crusade.

Going in a pretty compact body, with a great deal of howling and hymning, such as that with which all conscripts, either of the cross or guillotine, are accustomed to stimulate one another’s courage and vanity, we crossed a Croksted Lane, and again a sweep of wild heath, that spread towards the dense forests called Northwood, which fill all that shallow valley from Sydenham Wells on the north to Penge Common on the south. And presently coming to the trees, and entering a wide, elegant clearing amidst them, where the woods were banked behind, and the ground dropped towards us in terraces, on the highest we saw the house standing, a great sunny block of brick and stone, but shuttered now, and apparently lifeless.

The mob at first knocked on the door with a diffidence inspired of its varnished and portly exclusiveness; but, provoking no response, presently grew bolder and more clamorous. Still, I believe, its fervour would ultimately have wasted itself on this inflexible barrier, had not my master, with some disgusted expressions of contempt, come to the front and taunted it on to a violence the more vicious because it was shamefaced. Under his stimulus, then, the panels were beginning to crack, when in a moment the bolts flew, and there stood in the opening a little sinister fellow in grey, who asked us, curt and ironic, our business.

All but my master fell back before him, though there were some broken cries touching the Scarlet Woman, which the sweep took up.

The little man wrinkled his little acrid nose. He was nobody, it turned out, but the Scotch steward, holding staunch to his post; but he was cut and coloured like steel.

“D’ye ask here for your doxy?” he said. “Go back, man, and look where you left her in the tavern.”

The sweep, only half understanding, spat out a mouthful of oaths.

“We want that there Pope!” he roared. “Bring us to the black devil, you.”

“After you, sir,” answered the other politely.

My master, looking horribly ugly, repeated his demand.

“Well,” said the steward, “this is fair humours, Newcastle asking for coals!”

The words were hardly out of him, when my master smote him down, and pushed into the house. He gave a little quiver, like unstrung wire, and lay senseless, the red running from his nostrils.

_Mon chéri_, hast thou ever seen a pack of mongrels snarl aloof, fearful and agitated, about a dog-fight, and in a moment break in with coward teeth upon the conquered? So over the body of the steward trampled this rabble, blooded now at another’s expense, and reckless in its consciousness of self-irresponsibility. They had found a champion to take the onus of this, and all worse that might happen, off their shoulders.

But they were destined to discover no further chestnuts for their catspaw. The Jesuit had fled, it appeared, with the rest of the family; and so they must content themselves with wrecking the private chapel, where the household was wont to practise its treasonable rites.

Now, my master, who was eager after spoil, sweating and toiling in the thick of the press, left me unguardedly to my own devices; and suddenly I found myself quite alone in a closet hung with vestments, where there was a fireplace with an open bricked hearth, having no signs of usage, which immediately, from habit, caught my attention. And straight, at last, God, pitiful to His poor little derelict, touched the cross on my breast, and quickened inspiration in that where I had supposed all was dead. I slid into the chimney, and went up, up, like an eel in a well rising for air. The sounds of destruction grew attenuated beneath me; I smelt life and freedom, and swarmed faster in my agony to attain them. The chimney, clean as at its building, let down no token of my passage by it, and in a few moments I emerged from the summit, and, tumbling into the cleft of a long double roof--found myself face to face with a man who was there before me.