A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe [best novels to read for beginners txt] 📗

leave to pass through the town in the open highway, and deny me provisions for my money, is to say the town has a right to starve me to death, which cannot be true. Thomas

But they do not deny you liberty to go back again from whence you came, and therefore they do not starve you.

John

But the next town behind me will, by the same rule, deny me leave to go back, and so they do starve me between them. Besides, there is no law to prohibit my travelling wherever I will on the road.

Thomas

But there will be so much difficulty in disputing with them at every town on the road that it is not for poor men to do it or undertake it, at such a time as this is especially.

John

Why, brother, our condition at this rate is worse than anybody else’s, for we can neither go away nor stay here. I am of the same mind with the lepers of Samaria: “If we stay here we are sure to die,” I mean especially as you and I are stated, without a dwelling-house of our own, and without lodging in anybody else’s. There is no lying in the street at such a time as this; we had as good go into the dead-cart at once. Therefore I say, if we stay here we are sure to die, and if we go away we can but die; I am resolved to be gone.

Thomas

You will go away. Whither will you go, and what can you do? I would as willingly go away as you, if I knew whither. But we have no acquaintance, no friends. Here we were born, and here we must die.

John

Look you, Tom, the whole kingdom is my native country as well as this town. You may as well say I must not go out of my house if it is on fire as that I must not go out of the town I was born in when it is infected with the plague. I was born in England, and have a right to live in it if I can.

Thomas

But you know every vagrant person may by the laws of England be taken up, and passed back to their last legal settlement.

John

But how shall they make me vagrant? I desire only to travel on, upon my lawful occasions.

Thomas

What lawful occasions can we pretend to travel, or rather wander upon? They will not be put off with words.

John

Is not flying to save our lives a lawful occasion? And do they not all know that the fact is true? We cannot be said to dissemble.

Thomas

But suppose they let us pass, whither shall we go?

John

Anywhere, to save our lives; it is time enough to consider that when we are got out of this town. If I am once out of this dreadful place, I care not where I go.

Thomas

We shall be driven to great extremities. I know not what to think of it.

John

Well, Tom, consider of it a little.

This was about the beginning of July; and though the plague was come forward in the west and north parts of the town, yet all Wapping, as I have observed before, and Redriff, and Ratdiff, and Limehouse, and Poplar, in short, Deptford and Greenwich, all both sides of the river from the Hermitage, and from over against it, quite down to Blackwall, was entirely free; there had not one person died of the plague in all Stepney parish, and not one on the south side of Whitechapel Road, no, not in any parish; and yet the weekly bill was that very week risen up to 1,006.

It was a fortnight after this before the two brothers met again, and then the case was a little altered, and the plague was exceedingly advanced and the number greatly increased; the bill was up at 2,785, and prodigiously increasing, though still both sides of the river, as below, kept pretty well. But some began to die in Redriff, and about five or six in Ratdiff Highway, when the sailmaker came to his brother John express, and in some fright; for he was absolutely warned out of his lodging, and had only a week to provide himself. His brother John was in as bad a case, for he was quite out, and had only begged leave of his master, the biscuit-maker, to lodge in an outhouse belonging to his workhouse, where he only lay upon straw, with some biscuit-sacks, or bread-sacks, as they called them, laid upon it, and some of the same sacks to cover him.

Here they resolved (seeing all employment being at an end, and no work or wages to be had), they would make the best of their way to get out of the reach of the dreadful infection, and, being as good husbands as they could, would endeavour to live upon what they had as long as it would last, and then work for more if they could get work anywhere, of any kind, let it be what it would.

While they were considering to put this resolution in practice in the best manner they could, the third man, who was acquainted very well with the sailmaker, came to know of the design, and got leave to be one of the number; and thus they prepared to set out.

It happened that they had not an equal share of money; but as the sailmaker, who had the best stock, was, besides his being lame, the most unfit to expect to get anything by working in the country, so he was content that what money they had should all go into one public stock, on condition that whatever any one of them could gain more than another, it should without any grudging be all added to the public stock.

They resolved to load themselves with as little baggage as possible because they resolved at first to travel on foot, and to go a great way