to Jerusalem . . . but that is a story I shall tell you later. In
the
meanwhile . . . .
CHAPTER IV
In the
meanwhileobtained the
horror of the
dungeons, after the
discovery of the plot to break prison. And never, during those
eternal hours of
waiting, was it
absent from my
consciousness" target="_blank" title="n.意识;觉悟;知觉">
consciousness that I
should follow these other
convicts out,
endure the hells of
inquisition they
endured, and be brought back a wreck and flung on
the stone floor of my stone-walled, iron-doored
dungeon.
They came for me. Ungraciously and ungently, with blow and curse,
they haled me forth, and I faced Captain Jamie and Warden Atherton,
themselves arrayed with the strength of half a dozen state-bought,
tax-paid brutes of guards who lingered in the room to do any
bidding. But they were not needed.
"Sit down," said Warden Atherton, indicating a stout arm-chair.
I,
beaten and sore, without water for a night long and a day long,
faint with
hunger, weak from a
beating that had been added to five
days in the
dungeon and eighty hours in the
jacket, oppressed by the
calamity of human fate,
apprehensive of what was to happen to me
from what I had seen happen to the others--I, a wavering waif of a
human man and an erstwhile professor of agronomy in a quiet college
town, I hesitated to accept the
invitation to sit down.
Warden Atherton was a large man and a very powerful man. His hands
flashed out to a grip on my shoulders. I was a straw in his
strength. He lifted me clear of the floor and crashed me down in
the chair.
" Now," he said, while I gasped and swallowed my pain, "tell me all
about it, Standing. Spit it out--all of it, if you know what's
healthy for you."
"I don't know anything about what has happened . . .", I began.
That was as far as I got. With a growl and a leap he was upon me.
Again he lifted me in the air and crashed me down into the chair.
"No
nonsense, Standing," he warned. "Make a clean breast of it.
Where is the
dynamite?"
"I don't know anything of any
dynamite," I protested.
Once again I was lifted and smashed back into the chair.
I have
endured
tortures of various sorts, but when I
reflect upon
them in the quietness of these my last days, I am
confident that no
other
torture was quite the equal of that chair
torture. By my body
that stout chair was battered out of any
semblance of a chair.
Another chair was brought, and in time that chair was demolished.
But more chairs were brought, and the
eternal questioning about the
dynamite went on.
When Warden Atherton grew tired, Captain Jamie relieved him; and
then the guard Monohan took Captain Jamie's place in smashing me
down into the chair. And always it was
dynamite,
dynamite, "Where
is the
dynamite?" and there was no
dynamite. Why, toward the last I
would have given a large
portion of my
immortal soul for a few
pounds of
dynamite to which I could
confess.
I do not know how many chairs were broken by my body. I fainted
times without number, and toward the last the whole thing became
nightmarish. I was half-carried, half-shoved and dragged back to
the dark. There, when I became
conscious, I found a stool in my
dungeon. He was a pallid-faced, little dope-fiend of a short-timer
who would do anything to
obtain the drug. As soon as I recognized
him I crawled to the
grating and shouted out along the corridor:
"There is a stool in with me, fellows! He's Ignatius Irvine! Watch
out what you say!"
The
outburst of imprecations that went up would have
shaken the
fortitude of a braver man than Ignatius Irvine. He was
pitiful in
his
terror, while all about him, roaring like beasts, the pain-
racked lifers told him what awful things they would do to him in the
years that were to come.
Had there been secrets, the presence of a stool in the
dungeons
would have kept the men quiet, As it was, having all sworn to tell
the truth, they talked
openly before Ignatius Irvine. The one great
puzzle was the
dynamite, of which they were as much in the dark as
was I. They appealed to me. If I knew anything about the
dynamitethey begged me to
confess it and save them all from further misery.
And I could tell them only the truth, that I knew of no
dynamite.
One thing the stool told me, before the guards removed him, showed
how serious was this matter of the
dynamite. Of course, I passed
the word along, which was that not a wheel had turned in the prison
all day. The thousands of
convict-workers had remained locked in
their cells, and the
outlook was that not one of the various prison-
factories would be operated again until after the discovery of some
dynamite that somebody had
hidden somewhere in the prison.
And ever the
examination went on. Ever, one at a time,
convicts
were dragged away and dragged or carried back again. They reported
that Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie, exhausted by their efforts,
relieved each other every two hours. While one slept, the other
examined. And they slept in their clothes in the very room in which
strong man after strong man was being broken.
And hour by hour, in the dark
dungeons, our
madness of
torment grew.
Oh, trust me as one who knows,
hanging is an easy thing compared
with the way live men may be hurt in all the life of them and still
live. I, too, suffered
equally with them from pain and
thirst; but
added to my
suffering was the fact that I remained
conscious to the
sufferings of the others. I had been an incorrigible for two years,
and my nerves and brain were hardened to
suffering. It is a
frightful thing to see a strong man broken. About me, at the one
time, were forty strong men being broken. Ever the cry for water
went up, and the place became
lunatic with the crying, sobbing,
babbling and raving of men in delirium.
Don't you see? Our truth, the very truth we told, was our
damnation. When forty men told the same things with such unanimity,
Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie could only conclude that the
testimony was a memorized lie which each of the forty rattled off
parrot-like.
From the
standpoint of the authorities, their situation was as
desperate as ours. As I
learned afterward, the Board of Prison
Directors had been summoned by
telegraph, and two companies of state
militia were being rushed to the prison.
It was winter weather, and the frost is sometimes
shrewd even in a
California winter. We had no blankets in the
dungeons. Please know
that it is very cold to stretch bruised human flesh on
frosty stone.
In the end they did give us water. Jeering and cursing us, the
guards ran in the fire-hoses and played the
fierce streams on us,
dungeon by
dungeon, hour after hour, until our bruised flesh was
battered all anew by the
violence with which the water smote us,
until we stood knee-deep in the water which we had raved for and for
which now we raved to cease.
I shall skip the rest of what happened in the
dungeons. In passing
I shall merely state that no one of those forty lifers was ever the
same again. Luigi Polazzo never recovered his reason. Long Bill
Hodge slowly lost his sanity, so that a year later, he, too, went to
live in Bughouse Alley. Oh, and others followed Hodge and Polazzo;
and others, whose
physical stamina had been impaired, fell victims
to prison-tuberculosis. Fully 25 per cent. of the forty have died
in the succeeding six years.
After my five years in
solitary, when they took me away from San
Quentin for my trial, I saw Skysail Jack. I could see little, for I
was blinking in the
sunshine like a bat, after five years of
darkness; yet I saw enough of Skysail Jack to pain my heart. It was
in crossing the Prison Yard that I saw him. His hair had turned
white. He was prematurely old. His chest had caved in. His cheeks
were
sunken. His hands shook as with palsy. He tottered as he
walked. And his eyes blurred with tears as he recognized me, for I,
too, was a sad wreck of what had once been a man. I weighed eighty-