The tramping convicts marched round and round in single file to the tune of the fiddle. Some of them were little more than boys, eighteen or twenty years of age, and one or two of them were gray-haired men. Their dress was so levelling, and it seemed besides to stamp so strong an impression of rascality upon their faces, that one could not look at the ironed gang without supposing them all rogues and criminals of the worst sort. And yet I’d fancy, as they came facing aft toward the poop, I could see some countenances which would have passed in the streets and in company for comely, honest faces. But the general type was very villainous; the brow low, overhanging, and scowling: the eye small, deep-set, and restless; the mouth coarse and heavy, and the jaw strong, thick, defined like a beast’s.
My eye rested upon one man. I was certain I had seen him before. He was immensely broad-shouldered, pitted with small-pox. His arms were too long for his body, and the thickness of them and the fists were a giant’s. His eyebrows were black; his eyes a deep and fiery black; his nose coarse, spread, flat and heavy at the nostrils. He had the look of a Jew, and after I had watched him a little while, I said to myself: ‘Yes, now I remember. He is Barney Abram, the prize-fighter, who was under sentence of transportation for life in Newgate when I visited Tom in that jail with Uncle Johnstone.’
I craved to see my sweetheart. I waited for the hideous fiddle to cease squeaking, and for the gang to go below and a second gang to take its place, hoping that Tom might be one in this second gang. I say I waited. Rather, I stood hoping. Why they kept me waiting down to leeward on that poop I could not imagine. I guessed it would shock me horribly to see Tom with irons on, marching in convict’s attire, a mere machine at the will of warders, themselves convicts; yet did I passionately wish to see him that I might make sure he was on board, for though I never dreamt that Will had mistook, still I yearned to satisfy myself with my own eyesight. But the gang continued to march round and round to the strains of the fiddle. Oh, the mockery of the blithe Irish tune the fellow played, timed by the metallic tramp of felons on the echoing deck!
CHAPTER XIX
SHE IS QUESTIONED BY THE DOCTOR
I was kept waiting, I knew not why, and used my leisure to gaze about me. I was without fear. I had scraped, with a stout heart, through the worst part, and cared little for what might follow. I had made up my mind to avow my sex if they should send me into the forecastle to live. I was very sure I should be unable to keep my secret amongst that body of rough, blaspheming, joking sailors. Nor should I be equal to the work of a seaman—I mean as an ordinary seaman or boy. It turned me dizzy to look aloft and think of climbing those towering heights.
Whilst I thus thought, I used my eyes and examined the ship. Opposite the main-hatch, within the convicts’ inclosure, stood a tall box, something like a sentry-box; over it a bucket was hung by an iron bar, and there was a short length of rope attached to the bucket. I supposed the box was a sort of shower-bath for the prisoners. The main hatch was the only visible means of entering and leaving the prison quarters. It was extraordinarily protected, first, with heavy gratings with a manhole for the passage of one body, then by a strong railing of oak stanchions of a triangular shape, thickly studded with iron nails (the tops or heads of these stanchions I could just see as they sank like the vertical wires of a cage from the sides of the hatch down to the lower-deck), then by a strong bulkheaded passage or corridor with a door at the end, as I mentioned when I spoke of the sentry stationed there. I saw two galleys. The forward one I guessed was for the ship’s use, the after for the convicts; for in this galley I had observed a man in felon’s dress. A huge long-boat lay stowed in chocks athwartships just forward of the ship’s galley.
Such details to me entered like the very spirit of prison life into the gleaming fabric of the ship, soiling, debasing, so flavouring her that there was no magic in the pure freshness of the ocean wind to purge her into sweetness. Marvellous that human sin should subtly enter and find expression in timber and hemp and canvas, in bricks and mortar, in old hulks, in prison piles—it matters not what—subduing all suggestions to its own inspirations. I had noticed how the sordid influence and degrading quality of human wickedness had worked in dismantled hulks, making more hideous that which was already hideous with felon-carpentry; and now here was all beauty in this buoyant and bounding picture of a ship in full sail, leaning from the shining breeze, pouring into her wake the snow of the crested and dissolving surge, dimmed and defiled and saddened by her errand and cargo, by the aspect of her decks, and by the noise of men marching in irons.
All this while the doctor stood at the break of the poop with his hands upon the rail, watching the convicts exercising, and sometimes nodding in time when the fiddler changed his tune; the captain likewise watched the convicts from the head of the weather poop ladder; the two officers patrolled the weather deck, and both of them constantly looked at me when their walk brought them with their faces forward; the second mate was near the wheel, and the two sentries, with shouldered muskets with shining bayonets, crossed and recrossed each other at a little distance from where I stood.