He walked with a cadence. Never did honest man look fiercer.
Ursus, for a moment thrown out of his way in the tangled skein of streets, overtook, close to Saint Mary Overy, the cortège, which had fortunately been retarded in the churchyard by a fight between children and dogs, a common incident in the streets in those days. "Dogs and boys," say the old registers of police, placing the dogs before the boys.
A man being taken before a magistrate by the police was, after all, an every-day affair, and each one having his own business to attend to, the few who had followed soon dispersed. There remained but Ursus on the track of Gwynplaine.
They passed before two chapels opposite to each other, belonging the one to the Recreative Religionists, the other to the Hallelujah League, sects which flourished then, and which exist to the present day.
Then the cortège wound from street to street, making a zigzag, choosing by preference lanes not yet built on, roads where the grass grew, and deserted alleys.
At length it stopped.
It was in a little lane with no houses except two or three hovels. This narrow alley was composed of two walls, one on the left, low; the other on the right, high. The high wall was black, and built in the Saxon style with narrow holes, scorpions, and large square gratings over narrow loopholes. There was no window on it, but here and there slits, old embrasures of pierriers and archegayes. At the foot of this high wall was seen, like the hole at the bottom of a rat-trap, a little wicket gate, very elliptical in its arch.
This small door, incased in a full, heavy girding of stone, had a grated peephole, a heavy knocker, a large lock, hinges thick and knotted, a bristling of nails, an armour of plates, and hinges, so that altogether it was more of iron than of wood.
There was no one in the lane. No shops, no passengers; but in it there was heard a continual noise, as if the lane ran parallel to a torrent. There was a tumult of voices and of carriages. It seemed as if on the other side of the black edifice there must be a great street, doubtless the principal street of Southwark, one end of which ran into the Canterbury road, and the other on to London Bridge.
All the length of the lane, except the cortège which surrounded Gwynplaine, a watcher would have seen no other human face than the pale profile of Ursus hazarding a half advance from the shadow of the corner of the wall; looking, yet fearing to see. He had posted himself behind the wall at a turn of the lane.
The constables grouped themselves before the wicket. Gwynplaine was in He centre, the wapentake and his baton of iron being now behind him.
The justice of the quorum raised the knocker, and struck the door three times. The loophole opened.
The justice of the quorum said:
"By order of her Majesty."
The heavy door of oak and iron turned on its hinges, making a chilly opening, like the mouth of a cavern. A hideous depth yawned in the shadow.
Ursus saw Gwynplaine disappear within it.
* * *
V
A FEARFUL PLACE
THE WAPENTAKE entered behind Gwynplaine.
Then the justice of the quorum.
Then the constables.
The wicket was closed.
The heavy door swung to, closing hermetically on the stone sills, without any one seeing who had opened or shut it. It seemed as if the bolts re-entered their sockets of their own act. Some of these mechanisms, the inventions of ancient intimidation, still exist in old prisons; doors of which you saw no doorkeeper. With them the entrance to a prison becomes like the entrance to a tomb.
This wicket was the lower door of Southwark jail.
There was nothing in the harsh and worm-eaten aspect of this prison to soften its appropriate air of rigour.
Originally a pagan temple, built by the Catieuchlans for the Mogons, ancient English gods, it became a palace for Ethelwolf and a fortress for Edward the Confessor; then it was elevated to the dignity of a prison, in 1199, by John Lackland. Such was Southwark jail. This jail, at first intersected by a street, like Chenonceaux by a river, had been for a century or two a gate, that is to say, the gate of the suburb; the passage had then been walled up. There remain in England some prisons of this nature. In London, Newgate; at Canterbury, Westgate; at Edinburgh, Canongate. In France the Bastile was originally a gate.
Almost all the jails of England present the same appearance--a high wall without and a hive of cells within. Nothing could be more funereal than the appearance of those prisons, where spiders and justice spread their webs and where John Howard, that ray of light, had not yet penetrated. Like the old Gehenna of Brussels, they might well have been designated Thränenhaus--the house of tears.
Men felt before such buildings, at once so savage and inhospitable, the same distress that the ancient navigators suffered before the hell of slaves mentioned by Plautus, islands of creaking chains, ferricrepiditæ insulæ, when they passed near enough to hear the clank of the fetters.
Southwark jail, an old place of exorcisms and torture, was originally used solely for the imprisonment of sorcerers, as was proved by two verses engraved on a defaced stone at the foot of the wicket:
Est energumenus, quem dæmon possidet unus.
Lines which draw a subtle delicate distinction between the demoniac and man possessed by a devil.
At the bottom of this inscription, nailed flat against the wall, was a stone ladder, which had been originally of wood, but which had been changed into stone by being buried in earth of petrifying quality at a place called Apsley Gowis, near Woburn Abbey.
The prison of Southwark, now demolished, opened on two streets, between which, as a gate, it formerly served as means of communication. It had two doors. In the large street a door, apparently used by the authorities; and in the lane the door of punishment, used by the rest of the living and by the dead also, because when a prisoner in the jail died it was by that issue that his corpse was carried out. A liberation not to be despised.
Death is release into infinity.
It was by the gate of punishment that Gwynplaine had been taken into the prison.
The lane, as we have said, was nothing but a little passage, paved with flints, confined between two opposite walls. There is one of the same kind at Brussels called Rue d'une Personæ. The walls were unequal in height. The high one was the prison; the low one, the cemetery--the enclosure for the mortuary remains of the jail--was not higher than the ordinary stature of a man. In it was a gate almost opposite the prison wicket. The dead had only to cross the street; the cemetery alas but twenty paces from the jail. On the high wall was affixed a gallows; on the low one eras sculptured a Death's head. Neither of these walls made its opposite neighbour more cheerful.
A single devil only works in the fanatical. */line
* * *
VI
THE KIND OF MAGISTRACY UNDER THE WIGS OF FORMER DAYS
ANY ONE OBSERVING at that moment the other side of the prison--its façade--would have perceived the high street of Southwark, and might have remarked, stationed before the monumental and official entrance to the jail, a traveling carriage, recognised as such by its imperial A few idlers surrounded the carriage. On it was a coat-of-arms, and a personage had been seen to descend from it and enter the prison. "Probably a magistrate," conjectured the crowd. Many of the English magistrates were noble, and almost all had the right of bearing arms. In France blazon and robe were almost contradictory terms. The Duke Saint-Simon says, in speaking of magistrates, "People of that class." In England a gentleman was not despised for being a judge. There are traveling magistrates in England; they are called judges of circuit, and nothing was easier than to recognise the carriage as the vehicle of a judge on circuit. That which was less comprehensible was, that the supposed magistrate got down, not from the carriage itself, but from the box, a place which is not habitually occupied by the owner. Another unusual thing. People traveled at that period in England in two ways. By coach, at the rate of a shilling for five miles, and by post, paying three half-pence
per mile, and twopence to the postilion after each stage. A private carriage, whose owner desired to travel by relays, paid as many shillings per horse per mile as the horseman paid pence. The carriage drawn up before the jail in Southwark had four horses and two postilions, which displayed princely state. Finally, that which excited and disconcerted conjectures to the utmost was the circumstance that the carriage was sedulously shut up. The blinds of the windows were closed up. The glasses in front were darkened by blinds; every opening by which the eye might have penetrated was masked. From without nothing within could be seen, and most likely from within nothing could be seen outside. However, it did not seem probable that there was any one in the carriage.
Southwark being in Surrey, the prison was within the jurisdiction of the sheriff of the county.
Such distinct jurisdictions were very frequent in England. Thus, for example, the Tower of London was not supposed to be situated in any county; that is to say, that, legally, it was considered to be in air. The Tower recognised no authority of jurisdiction except in its own constable who was qualified as custos turris. The Tower had its jurisdiction, its church, its court of justice, and its government apart. The authority of its custos or constable extended, beyond London, over twenty-one hamlets. As in Great Britain legal singularities engraft one upon another, the office of the master gunner of England was derived from the Tower of London.
Other legal customs seem still more whimsical. Thus, the English Court of Admiralty consults and applies the laws of Rhodes and of Oleron, a French island which was once English.
The sheriff of a county was a person of high consideration. He was always an esquire, and sometimes a knight. He was called spectabilis in the old deeds, "a man to be looked at," a kind of intermediate title between illustris and clarissimus--less than the first, more than the second. Long ago the sheriffs of the counties were chosen by the people; but Edward II, and after him Henry VI, having claimed their nomination for the crown, the office of sheriff became a royal emanation.
They all received their commissions from majesty, except the sheriff of Westmoreland, whose office was hereditary, and the sheriff's of London and Middlesex, who were elected by the livery in the common hall. Sheriffs of Wales and Chester possessed certain fiscal prerogatives. These appointments are all still in existence in England, but, subjected little by little to the friction of manners and ideas, they have lost their old aspects. It was the duty of the sheriff of the county to escort and protect the judges on circuit As we have two arms, he had two officers: his right arm the under-sheriff, his left arm the justice of the quorum. The justice of the quorum, assisted by the bailiff of the hundred, termed the wapentake, apprehended, examined, and, under the responsibility of the sheriff, imprisoned, for trial by the judges of circuit, thieves, murderers, rebels, vagabonds, and all sorts of felons. The shade of difference between the under-sheriff and the justice of the quorum, in their hierarchical service toward the sheriff, was that the under-sheriff accompanied and the justice of the quorum assisted. The sheriff held two courts, one fixed and central, the county court, and a movable court, the sheriff's turn. He thus represented both unity and ubiquity. He might as judge be aided and informed on legal questions by the sergeant of the coif called sergens confæ, who is a sergeant-at-law, and who wears under his black skull-cap a fillet of white Cambray lawn. The sheriff delivered the jails. When he arrived at a town in his province, he had the right of summary trial of the prisoners, of whom he might cause either the release or the execution. This was called a jail delivery. The sheriff presented bills of indictment to the twenty-four members of the grand jury. If they approved, they wrote above, billa vera; if the contrary, they wrote ignoramus. In the latter case the accusation was annulled, and the sheriff had the privilege of tearing up the bill. If during the deliberation a juror died, this legally acquitted the prisoner and made him innocent, and the sheriff, who had the privilege of arresting the accused, had also that of setting him at liberty. That which made the sheriff singularly feared and respected was that he had the charge of executing all the orders of her Majesty, a fearful latitude. An arbitrary power lodges in such commissions. The officers termed vergers, the coroners making part of the sheriff's cortege, and the clerks of the market as escort, with gentlemen on horseback and their servants in livery, made a handsome suite. The sheriff, says Chamberlayne, is the "life of justice, of law, and of the country."
In England an insensible demolition constantly pulverises and dissevers laws and customs. You must understand in our day that neither the sheriff, the wapentake, nor the justice of the quorum could exercise their functions as they did then. There was in the England of the past a certain confusion of powers, whose ill-defined attributes resulted in their overstepping their real bounds at times, a thing which would be impossible in the present day. The usurpation of power by police and justices has ceased. We believe that even the word wapentake has changed its meaning. It implied a magisterial function: now it signifies a territorial division: it specified the centurion; it now specifies the hundred (centrum).
Moreover, in those days the sheriff. of the county combined with something more and something less, and condensed in his own authority, which was at once royal and municipal, the two magistrates formerly called in France the civil lieutenant of Paris and the lieutenant of police. The civil lieutenant of Paris, Monsieur, is pretty well described in an old police note: "The civil lieutenant had no dislike to domestic quarrels, because he always has the pickings."--22d July, 1704. As to the lieutenant of police, he was a redoubtable person, multiple and vague. The best personification of him was Rene d'Argenson, who, as was said by Saint-Simon, displayed in his face the three judges of hell united.
The three judges of hell sat, as has already been seen, at Bishopsgate, London.
* * *
VII
SHUDDERING
WHEN GWYNPLAINE heard the wicket shut, creaking in all its bolts, he trembled. It seemed to him that the door which had just closed was the communication between light and darkness; opening on one side on the living, human crowd, and on the other on a dead world, and now that everything illumined by the sun was behind him, that he had stepped over the boundary of life and was standing without it, his heart contracted. What were they going to do with him? What did it all mean?
Where was he?
He saw nothing around him; he found himself in perfect darkness. The shutting of the door had momentarily blinded him. The window in the door had been closed as well. No loophole, no lamp. Such were the precautions of old times. It was forbidden to light the entrance to the Jails, so that the newcomers should take no observations.
Gwynplaine extended his arms, and touched the wall on the right side and on the left. He was in a passage. Little by little a cavernous daylight exuding, no one knows whence, and which floats about dark places, and to which the dilatation of the pupil adjusts itself slowly, enabled him to distinguish a feature here and there, and the corridor was vaguely sketched out before him.
Gwynplaine, who had never had a glimpse of penal severities, save in the exaggerations of Ursus, felt as though seized by a sort of vague gigantic hand. To be caught in the mysterious toils of the law is frightful. He who is brave in all other dangers is disconcerted in the presence of justice. Why? Is it that the justice of man works in twilight and the judge gropes his way? Gwynplaine remembered what Ursus had told him of the necessity for silence. He wished to see Dea again; he felt some discretionary instinct, which urged him not to irritate. Sometimes to wish to be enlightened is to make matters worse; on the other hand, however, the weight of the adventure was so overwhelming that he gave way at length and could not restrain a question.
"Gentlemen," said he, "whither are you taking me?"
They made no answer.
It was the law of silent capture, and the Norman text is formal: "A silentiariis ostio præpositis introducti sunt."
This silence froze Gwynplaine. Up to that moment he had believed himself to be
firm: he was self-sufficing. To be self-sufficing is to be powerful. He had lived isolated from the world, and imagined that being. alone he was unassailable; and now all at once he felt himself under the pressure of a hideous collective force. How was he to combat that horrible anonym, the law? He felt faint under the perplexity; a fear of an unknown character had found a fissure in his armour; besides, he had not slept, he had not eaten, he had scarcely moistened his lips with a cup of tea. The whole night had been passed in a kind of delirium, and the fever was still on him. He was thirsty; perhaps hungry. The craving of the stomach disorders everything. Since the previous evening all kinds of incidents had assailed him. The emotions which had tormented had sustained him. Without the storm a sail would be a rag. But his was the excessive feebleness of the rag, which the wind inflates till it tears it. He felt himself sinking. Was he about to fall without consciousness on the pavement? To faint is the resource of a woman and the humiliation of a man. He hardened himself, but he trembled.
He felt as one losing his footing.
* * *
VIII
LAMENTATION
THEY BEGAN to move forward.
They advanced through the passage.
There was no preliminary registry, no place of record. The prisons in those times were not overburdened with documents. They were content to close round you without knowing why. To be a prison, and to hold prisoners, sufficed.
The procession was obliged to lengthen itself out, taking the form of the corridor. They walked almost in single file; first the wapentake, then Gwynplaine, then the justice of the quorum, then the constables, advancing in a group, and blocking up the passage behind Gwynplaine as with a bung. The passage narrowed. Now Gwynplaine touched the walls with both his elbows. In the roof, which was made of flints, dashed with cement, was a succession of granite arches jutting out, and still more contracting the passage. He had to stoop to pass under them. No speed was possible in that corridor. Any one trying to escape through it would have been compelled to move slowly. The passage twisted. All entrails are tortuous: those of a prison as well as those of a man. Here and there, sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left, spaces in the wall, square and closed by large iron gratings, gave glimpses of flights of stairs, some descending and some ascending.