The Victorian Villains Megapack (40 page)

“Any questions?”

Pringle declined the clerk’s invitation, and the police evidence, officially concise, followed.

“Any questions?”

No, again.

“Is anything known of him?” inquired the old gentleman. An inspector rose from the well in front of the bench, and said: “There have been a number of cases in the neighbourhood lately, sir, and I should be glad of a remand to see if he can be identified.”

“Very well. Remanded for a week.” And so, after a breathless hearing of about two and three-quarter minutes by the clock, Pringle found himself standing outside the court again.

“’Ow long ’ave yer got?” Instead of going along the passage, Pringle had been turned into a room which stood handy at the foot of the steps, where he was greeted by a number of (by this time) old acquaintances.

“I’m remanded for a week.”

“Same ’ere,” observed his cell-fellow of the night before. “I’ll see yer, mos’ likely, at the show.”

“Any bloke for the ’Ville?” inquired a large, red-faced gentleman, with a pimple of a nose which he accentuated by shaving clean.

“Yus; I’ve got six months,” said one.

“Garn!” contemptuously replied the face. “Yer’ll go to the Scrubbs.”

“Garn yerself!” retorted the other; and as the discussion at once became warm and general Pringle sat down in a far corner, where the disjointed shreds of talk fused into an odd patchwork.

‘”E sayd you’re charged with a vurry terrible thing, sayd ’e (hor! hor! hor!), I tell yer, ef yer wants the strite tip—don’t you flurry yer fat, now—so, says I, then yer can swear to my character—they used to call it cocoa-castle, strite they did—”

“Answer your names, now!”

The gaoler was holding the door open. Beside him stood a sergeant with a sheaf of blue papers, from which he called the names, and as each man answered he was arranged in order along the passage. It was a welcome relief. Pringle began to feel faint, having eaten nothing since the morning, and, what with the coarse hilarity and the stuffy atmosphere by which he had been environed so many hours, his head ached distractingly.

“Forward now—keep your places!” The procession tramped into an open yard, where a police van stood waiting. With much clattering of bars, jingling of keys, and banging of doors, the men, to the number of a dozen or so, were packed into the little sentry-boxes which ran round the inside of the van, its complement being furnished by four or five ladies, brought from another part of the establishment. This done, the sergeant, closing the door after him, gave the word to start, and the heavy van, lumbering out of the yard, rolled down the street like a ship in a gale.

“Gimme a light,” said a voice close to the little trap in Pringle’s cell door. Looking out, he found he was addressed by a youth in the opposite box, who extended a cigarette across the corridor.

“Sorry, I haven’t got one,” Pringle apologised.

‘”Ere y’are,” came from the box on Pringle’s right, and a smouldering stump was handed to the youth, who proceeded to light another from it.

‘”Ave a whiff, guv’nor?” courteously offered the invisible owner. An obscene paw, holding the returned fag, appeared at the aperture.

“No, thanks,” declined Pringle hastily.

“Las’ chance for a week,” urged the man, with genuine altruism.

“I don’t smoke,” protested Pringle to spare his feelings, adding, as the van turned off the road and came to a stand, “Is this the House of Detention?”

“No; this is the ’Ville.” The van rumbled under an archway, and then, after more banging, jingling, and clattering, half a dozen men were extracted from the boxes and deposited in the yard.

“Goodbye, Bill! Keep up yer sperrits!” screamed a soprano from the inmost recesses of the van.

“Come and meet us at the fortnight,” growled a deepest base from the courtyard.

A calling of names, the tramp of feet, then silence for a while, only broken by the champing of harness. Presently a brisk order, and, rumbling through the arch again, they were surrounded by the noise of traffic. But it was not for long; a few minutes, seconds even, and they halted once more, while heavy doors groaned apart. Then, clattering through a portico full of echoes, and describing a giddy curve, the van abruptly stopped as an iron gate crashed dismally in the rear.

‘”Ere we are guv’nor!” remarked the altruist.

Romney Pringle in THE HOUSE OF DETENTION

Clang, clang! Clang-a-clang, clang!

As the bell continued to ring Mr. Pringle started from an unrestful slumber, and, sitting up in bed, stared all around. Everything was so painfully white that his eyes closed spasmodically.

White walls, white-vaulted ceiling, even the floor was whitish-coloured—all white, but for the black door-patch at one end, and on this he gazed for respite from the glare. Slowly he took it all in—the bare table-slab, the shelf with its little stack of black volumes, the door, handleless and iron-sheeted, above all the twenty-four little squares of ground glass with their horizontal bars broadly shadowed in the light of the winter morning.

It was no dream, then, he told himself.

The thin mattress, only a degree less harsh than the plank bed beneath, was too insistent, obstinately as he might close his eyes to all beside. And, as he sat, the events of the last six and thirty hours came crowding through his memory. How clearly he saw it all! Not a detail was missing.

Again he stood by the riverside, the bare trees dripping in the mist; again he saw the ingots, and lent unwilling aid to save them, fingered the contemptuous vails, sole profit of their discovery. He was crossing the bridge; beyond shone the lights of the tavern, and there within he saw the frowsy crowd of loafers, and the barman proving the base coin he innocently tendered. And then came the arrest, the police cell, the filthy sights and sounds, the court with its sodden, sickening atmosphere, and, last of all, the prison. What a trap had he, open-eyed, walked into! For a second he ground his teeth in impotent fury.

The bell ceased. Dejectedly he rose, wondering as to the toilet routine of the establishment. Shaving was not to be thought of, he supposed, but enforced cleanliness was a thing he had read of somewhere. How long would last night’s bath stand good for? He looked at the single coarse brown towel and shuddered. Footsteps approached; he heard voices and the jingling of keys, then the lock shot noisily, and the door was flung open.

“Now, then, put out your slops and roll your bedding up.”

Pringle obeyed, but his bed-making was so lavish of space that when the warder peeped in again, some ten minutes later, he regarded the heap with a condescending grin, and presently returned with a prisoner who deftly rolled the sheets and blankets into a bundle whose end-on view resembled a variegated archery target. Then the hinges creaked once more, the lock snapped, and Pringle was left to his meditations. They were not of a cheerful nature, and it was with an exceeding bitter smile that he set himself to seriously review his position. Already had he decided that to reveal himself as the proprietor of that visionary literary agency in Furnival’s Inn would only serve to increase the suspicion that already surrounded him, while availing nothing to free him from the present charge—if even it did not result in fresh accusations! On the other hand, unless he did so he could see no way of obtaining any money from his bankers so to avail himself of the very small loophole of escape which a legal defence might afford.

He had one consolation—a very small one, it is true. Money is never without its uses, and it was with an eye to future contingencies that he had managed to secrete a single half-sovereign on first arriving at the gaol. Whilst waiting, half-undressed, to enter the searching room, he bethought him of a strip of old-fashioned court-plaster which he was accustomed to carry in his pocket-book. He took it out, and, waiting his opportunity, stuck half a sovereign upon it and then pressed the strip against his shin, where it held fast.

“What’s that?” inquired a warder a few minutes later, as Pringle stood stripped beneath a measuring gauge.

“I grazed my skin a couple of days ago,” said he glibly.

“Graze on right shin!” repeated the warder mechanically to a colleague who was booking Pringle’s description; and that was how the coin escaped discovery such time as he was being measured, weighed, searched, examined, and made free of the House of Detention. As he paced up and down the cell, occasionally fingering the little disc in his pocket, its touch did something to leaven his first sensations of helplessness, but they returned with pitiless logic so soon as he thought of escape. Bribery with such a sum was absurd, and he saw only too plainly that the days of Trenck and Casanova were gone forever.

Chafing at the thought of his sorry fate, Pringle turned for distraction to the inscriptions which on all sides adorned the plaster walls. They were scarcely so ornate as those existing in the Tower, and their literary merit was of the scantiest; nevertheless they were not without a human interest, especially to a fellow sufferer like Pringle.

The first he lighted on appeared to be the record of a deserter: “Alf. Toppy out of Scrubbs 2nd May, now pulled for deserting from 2nd Batt. W. Norfolk.”

“H. Allport” informed all whom it might concern that he was “pinched for felony”. Another soldier—it is to be hoped not a criminal—was indicated by the simple record, “Johore, Chitral, Rawal Pindi.”

One prisoner had summed up his self-compassion in the ejaculation, “Poor old Dick!”

“Cheer up, mate, you’ll be out some day,” was no doubt intended to be comforting, whilst there was a suggestion of tragedy in the statement, “I am an innocent man charged with felony by an intoxicated woman.”

It seemed to be the felonious etiquette for prisoners to give their addresses as well as their names—thus, “Dave Conolly from Mint Street.”

“Dick Callaghan, Lombard Street, Boro, anyone going that way tell Polly Regan I expect nine moon,” set Pringle wondering why on earth Dick had not written to Polly and delivered his message for himself. An ingenuous youth was “Willie, from Dials, fullied for taking a kettle without asking for it”, with his artless postscript, “only wanted to know the time”, but perhaps he passed for a humorist among his acquaintances, while “Darky, from Sailor’s kip the Highway, nicked for highway robbery with violence”, had a matter-of-fact ruffianism about it which spoke for itself.

From these sordid archives Pringle turned to the printed rules hanging from a peg in the cell, but they were couched in such an aridly official style as to remind him but the more cruelly of his position, and in considerable depression he resumed his now familiar tour—four paces to the window, a turn, and four paces back again, which was the utmost measure of the floor space.

He had almost ceased to regard any plan of escape as feasible, when the idea of Free-masonry occurred as a last resort. Amongst his other studies of human nature Pringle had not neglected the mummeries of The Craft; he had even attained the eminence of a ‘Grand Zerubbahel’. Now, he thought, was the time to test the efficacy of the doctrines he had absorbed and expounded; he would try the effect of masonic symbolism upon the warder.

Soon again the keys rattled and the doors banged; nearer came the sounds, the echoes louder, but now there was a clattering as of tinware. The door was flung open, the warder took a small cube loaf of brown bread from the tray carried by a prisoner, and slapped it, with a tin resembling a squat beer-can, down on the table board. The tin was full of hot cocoa, and, quickly raising it with a peculiar motion of the hand, Pringle inquired genially, “How old is your mother?”

The warder stopped in the act of shutting the door; he pulled it open again, and glared speechless at the audacious questioner. For quite a minute he stood; then, with an accent which his emotion only rendered the purer, he growled:

“None of yer larrks now, me man!”

As the door slammed Pringle mechanically tore the coarse brown bread into fragments, and soaking them in the cocoa, swallowed them unheedingly. His last scheme had gone the same road as its predecessors, and he no longer attempted to blind himself to the consequences. He scarcely noticed when the breakfast-ware was collected, silently handing out his tins in obedience to the summons.

He was still sitting on the stool, with eyes staring at the frosted windows which his thoughts saw far through and beyond, when the eternal unlocking began again. Listlessly he heard a voice repeating something at every door; he did not catch the words, but there was a tramp of many feet, and a bell was ringing. The voice grew louder; now it was at the next cell. He stood up.

“Chapel!”

Pringle stared at the warder—a fresh one this time.

“Get yer prayer-book and ’ymn-book, and come to chapel! Put yer badge on,” he added, looking back for a minute before continuing his monotonous chant.

Pringle picked up the black volumes and sent an inquiring glance around for the “badge”. Prisoner after prisoner defiled past the open door as he waited; then all at once he saw the warder’s meaning. Each man displayed a yellow badge upon his breast, and, looking round again, he saw, dangling upon his own gas-burner, a similar disc of felt, with the number of the cell stamped upon it. Hanging the tab upon his coat button, Pringle entered a gap in the procession duly labelled “B.3.6.” for the occasion.

Right overhead an endless column marched; on the gallery below he saw another, and all around was a rhythmic
tramp-tramp
in one and the same direction. Down a slope of stairs they went, across a flying bridge, and then along a gallery whose occupants had preceded them.
Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp
. Another bridge, and then a door opened into a huge barn of a hall.

Backless forms were ranged in long rows over the wooden floor, with here and there a little pew-like desk, from which the warders piloted their charges to their seats. The prisoner ahead of him was the end man of his bench, and Pringle, motioned to the next one, headed the file along it and sat down by the wall at the far end, with a warder in one of the little pews just in front.

“What yer in for, guv’nor?” asked someone in a husky growl.

Pringle looked round, but his immediate neighbour was glaring stolidly at the nearest warder, whose eye was upon them, and there was no one else within speaking distance but a decrepit old creature, obviously very deaf, on the row behind, and beyond him again a man of apparent education wearing a frock coat. From neither of these could such an inquiry have proceeded.

“Eyes front there! Don’t let me catch you looking round again.”

It was the warder who spoke in peremptory tones, and Pringle started at the words like a corrected schoolboy.

“Hymn number three.”

The chaplain had taken his stand by the altar, and the opening bars of Bishop Ken’s grand old hymn sounded from the organ. There was a rustle and shuffling of many feet as the whole assembly rose, the organist started the singing, and the many-voiced followed on with a roar which could not wholly slaughter the melody. Half-way through the first verse Pringle felt a nudge in the ribs and, barely inclining his head, caught the eye of his stolid neighbour as it closed in a grotesque wink. Keeping one eye on the little pew in front the man edged towards him, and repeated, in a singsong which fairly imitated the air of the hymn:

“What yer in for, matey?”

Taking his cue, Pringle changed back: “Snide coin,” and then a strange duet was sung to the old Genevan air.

“Fust time?”

“Yes.”

“Do a bloke a turn?”

“What’s that?”

“Change badges—I’ll tell yer why at exercise presently. Won’t ’urt you, an’ do me a sight er good!”

The hymn ceased, and the chaplain began to intone the morning prayers. As they all sat down, Pringle’s neighbour dropped his badge on the floor, and, pretending to reach for it, motioned to him to exchange.

The warder’s attention was elsewhere, and Pringle obligingly relabelled himself “C.2.24”.

A short and somewhat irrelevant address, another hymn, and the twenty minutes’ service was over. As bench after bench emptied, the monotonous tramp again echoed through the bare chamber, and a dusty haze rose and obscured the texts upon the altar. It was a single long procession that snaked round and round the corridors, and, descending by a fresh series of stairways and bridges, disappeared far below in the basement. The lower they got, the atmosphere became sensibly purer and less redolent of humanity, until at the very bottom Pringle felt a rush of air, welcome for all its coldness, and there, beyond an open grille, was an expanse of green bordered by shrubs, and, above all, the cheery sunlight.

“And earth laughed back at the day,” he murmured.

The grass was cut up by concentric rings of flagstones, and round these the prisoners marched at a brisk rate. Between every two rings were stone pedestals, each adorned with a warder, who from this elevation endeavoured to preserve a regulation space between the prisoners—that is to say, when he was not engaged in breathing almost equally futile threatenings against the conversation which hummed from every man who was not immediately in front of him And what a jumble of costumes! Tall hats mingled with bowlers and seedy caps that surely no man would pick from off a rubbish heap. Here the wearer of a frock-suit followed one who was literally a walking rag-shop; and, conspicuous among all with its ever-rakish air in the sober day-time, an opera hat spoke of hilariously twined vine-leaves.

“Thankee, guv’nor,” came a hoarse whisper from behind Pringle; “yer done me a good turn, yer ’ave so!”

The speaker was slight and sinuously active, with a cat-like gait—a typical burglar; also his hair was closely cropped in the style of the New Cut, which is characterised by a brow-fringe analogous to a Red Indian’s scalp-lock, being chivalrously provided for your opponent to clutch in single combat.

“What do you want my badge for?” inquired Pringle with less artistic gruffness.

“Why, the splits’ll be ’ere in a minute ter look at us—bust ’em! An’ I’ll be spotted—what ho! Well, they’ll take my number from this badge o’ yourn, ‘B.3.6’, an’ they’ll look up your name an’ think it’s an alias of mine—see? An’ then they’ll go an’ enter all my convictions ’gainst you—haw, haw!”

“Against me! But, I say, you know—”

“Don’t you fret—it’ll do you no ’arm! Now when I goes up on remand termorrer there won’t be nothing returned ’gainst me, so the beak’ll let me off light ’stead o’ fullyin’ me—”