The gallows, thereby spurring said inflation.
And damn my frugal self. For, at a cost
That scarce exceeds an evening at the pub,
Might I have hired those exc’llent Shaftoe boys,
Young Jack, and Bob, the elder of the pair,
To dangle from my legs, which lacking ballast,
Do flail most ineffectu’lly in the air,
And make a sort of entertainment for
The mobile.
Bob removes the noose from Jack’s neck.
But soft! The end approaches-
Earth fades-new worlds unfold before my eyes-
Can this be heaven? It seemeth warm, as if
A brazier had been fir’d ‘neath the ground.
Perhaps it is the warmth of God’s sweet love
That so envelops me.
Bob, dressed as a Devil, approaches with a long pointed Stick.
How now! What sort
Of angel doth sprout Horns upon his pate?
Where is thy Harp, O dark Seraph?
Instead of which a Pike, or Spit, doth seem
To occupy thy gnarled claws?
DEVIL:I am
The Devil’s Turnspit. Sinner, welcome home!
JACK:I thought that I had made my peace with God.
Indeed I had, when I did mount the scaffold.
If I had but died then, at Heaven’s Gate
I’d stand. But in my final agony,
I took God’s name in vain, and sundry mortal
Sins committed, and thus did damn myself
To this!
DEVIL:Hold still!
Devil shoves the point of his Spit up Jack’s arse-hole.
JACK:The pain! The pain, and yet,
It’s just a taste of what’s to come.
If only I had hired Jack and Bob!
Jack, by means of a conjuror’s trick, causes the point of the spit, smeared with blood, to emerge from his mouth, and is led away by the Devil, to violent applause and foot-stomping from the Crowd.
After the applause had died down, Jack, then, would circulate among the condemned to negotiate terms, and Bob, who was bigger, would watch his back, and mind the coin-purse.
When a woman is thus left desolate and void of counsel, she is just like a bag of money or a jewel dropt on the highway, which is a prey to the next comer.
-DANIELDEFOE,Moll Flanders
JACK HAD KEPT A SHREWDeye on the weather all spring and summer. It had been perfect. He was living in unaccustomed comfort in Strasbourg. This was a city on the Rhine, formerly German and, as of quite recently, French. It lay just to the south of a country called the Palatinate, which, as far as Jack could make out, was a moth-eaten rag of land straddling the Rhine. King Looie’s soldiers would overrun the Palatinate from the West, or the Emperor’s armies would rape and pillage it from the East, whenever they couldn’t think of anything else to do. The person in charge of the Palatinate was called an Elector, which in this part of the world meant a very noble fellow, more than a Duke but less than a King. Until quite recently the Electors Palatinate had been of a very fine and noble family, consisting of too many siblings to keep track of, most quite magnificent; but since only one (the oldest) could be Elector, all of the rest of them had gone out of that country, and found better things to do, or gotten themselves killed in more or less fascinating ways. Eventually the Elector had died and turned matters over to his son: an impotent madman named Charles, who liked to stage mock battles around an old Rhine-castle that wasn’t good for much else. The fighting was imaginary, but the trenches, siege-works, dysentery, and gangrene were real.
Now Jack had been making a sort of living, for several years, from being a fake soldier in France-a line of work that had been brought to ruin by many tiresome reforms that had recently been introduced to the French Army by one Martinet. When he’d heard about this crazy Elector he’d wasted no time in going to the Palatinate and finding gainful employment as a pretend musketeer.
Not long afterwards, King Louis XIV of France had attacked the nearby city of Strasbourg and made it his, and as frequently happened in sacked cities in those days, there had been a bit of the old Black Death. At the first appearance of buboes in the groins and armpits of the poor, the rich of Strasbourg had boarded up their houses and fled to the country. Many had simply climbed aboard boats and headed downstream on the Rhine, which had naturally taken them past that old wrack of a castle where Jack and others were playing at war for the amusement of the crazy Elector Palatine. One rich Strasbourgeois, there, had disembarked from his river-boat and struck up a conversation with none other than Jack Shaftoe. It was not customary for rich men to speak to the likes of Jack, and so the whole business seemed a mystery until Jack noticed that, no matter how he moved about, the rich man always found some pretext to stay well upwind of him.
This rich man had hired Jack and arranged for him to get something called a Plague Pass: a large document in that Gothickal German script with occasional excursions into something that looked like either Latin (when it was desirable to invoke the mercy and grace of God) or French (for sucking up to King Looie, only one rung below God at this point).*By flourishing this at the right times, Jack was able to carry out his mission, which was to go into Strasbourg; proceed to the rich man’s dwelling; wash off the red chalk crosses that marked it as a plague-house; pry off the deals he’d nailed over the doors and windows; chase out any squatters; fend off any looters; and live in it for a while. If, after a few weeks, Jack hadn’t died of the plague, he was to send word to this rich man in the country that it was safe to move back in.
Jack had accomplished the first parts of this errand in about May, but by the beginning of June had somehow forgotten about the last. In about mid-June, another Vagabond-looking fellow arrived. The rich man had hired him to go to the house and remove Jack’s body so that it wouldn’t draw vermin and then live in it for a while and, after a few weeks, if he hadn’t died of the plague, send word. Jack, who was occupying the master bedchamber, had accommodated this new fellow in one of the children’s rooms, showed him around the kitchen and wine-cellar, and invited him to make himself at home. Late in July, another Vagabond had showed up, and explained he’d been hired to cart away the bodies of the first two, et cetera, et cetera.
All spring and summer, the weather was ideaclass="underline" rain and sun in proportions suitable for the growing of grain. Vagabonds roamed freely in and out of Strasbourg, giving wide berths to those mounds of decomposing plague-victims. Jack sought out the ones who’d come from the east, treated them to the rich man’s brandy, conducted broken conversations with them in the zargon, and established two important facts: one, that the weather had been just as fine, if not finer, in Austria and Poland. Two, that Grand Vizier Khan Mustapha was still besieging the city of Vienna at the head of an army of two hundred thousand Turks.
Round September, he and his fellow-squatters found it necessary to depart from that fine house. It did not make him unhappy. Pretending to be dead was not a thing that came naturally to Vagabonds. The population of the house had swollen to a dozen and a half, most of them were tedious people, and the wine-cellar was nearly empty. One night Jack caused the window-shutters to be thrown open and the candles to be lit, and played host and lord over a grand squatters’ ball. Vagabond-musicians played raucous airs on shawms and pennywhistles, Vagabond-actors performed a comedy in zargon, stray dogs copulated in the family chapel, and Jack, presiding over all at the head of the table, dressed in the rich man’s satin, almost fell asleep. But even through the commotion of the ball, his ears detected the sound of hoofbeats approaching, swords being whisked from scabbards, firelocks being cocked. He was vanishing up the stairs even as the owner and his men were smashing down the door. Sliding down an escape-rope he’d long ago fixed to a balcony’s rail, he dropped neatly into the rich man’s saddle, still warm from thrashing the master’s chubby ass. He galloped to a potter’s field on the edge of town where he had stored some provisions against this very sort of event, and took to the road well supplied with salt-cod and biscuit. He rode southwards through the night until the horse was spent, then stripped off its fine saddle and threw it into a ditch, and traded the horse itself to a delighted ferryman for passage east across the Rhine. Finding the Munich road, he struck out for the East.