XI
The way from the station to the penitentiary was long, but Sheriff Bentley, being a man of small economies, had decided to walk, and after the long journey in the smoking-car, Archie had been glad to stretch his legs. The sun lay hot on the capital city; it was nearly noon, and workmen, tired from their morning’s toil, were thinking now of dinner-buckets and pipes in the shade. They glanced at Archie and the sheriff as they passed, but with small interest. They saw such sights every day and had long ago grown used to them, as the world had; besides, they had no way of telling which was the criminal and which the custodian.
Archie walked rapidly along, his head down, and a little careless smile on his face, chatting with the sheriff. On the way to the capital, Bentley had given him cigars, let him read the newspapers, and told him a number of vulgar stories. He was laughing then at one; the sheriff had leaned over to tell him the point of it, though he had difficulty in doing so, because he could not repress his own mirth. They were passing under a viaduct on which a railroad ran over the street. A switch-engine was going slowly along, and the fireman leaned out of the cab window. He wore, oddly enough, a battered old silk hat; he wore it in some humorous conceit that caricatured the grandeur and dignity the hat in its day had given some other man, whose face was not begrimed as was the comical face of this fireman, whose hands were not calloused as was the hand that slowly, almost automatically, pulled the bell-cord. That old plug hat gave the fireman unlimited amusement and consolation, as he thrust it from his cab window while he rode up and down the railroad yards. Archie looked up and caught the fireman’s eye; the fireman winked drolly, confidentially, and waved his free arm with a graceful, abandoned gesture that conveyed a salutation of brotherliness and comradeship; Archie smiled and waved his free arm in recognition.
And then they stepped out of the shade of the viaduct into the sun again, and Archie’s smile went suddenly from his face. They were at the penitentiary. The long wall stretched away, lifting its gray old stones twelve feet above their heads. Along its coping of broad overhanging flags was an iron railing; coming to the middle of a man, and at every corner, and here and there along the wall, were the sentry-boxes, black and weather-beaten, and sinister because no sentry was anywhere in sight. Archie looked, and he did not hear the dénouement of the sheriff’s story, which, after all, was just as well.
Midway of the block the wall jutted in abruptly and joined itself to a long building of gray stone, with three tiers of barred windows, but an ivy vine had climbed over the stones and hidden the bars as much as it could. A second building lifted its Gothic towers above the center of the grim facade, and beyond was another building like the first, wherein the motive of iron bars was repeated; then the climbing ivy and the gray wall again, stretching away until it narrowed in the perspective. Before the central building were green lawns and flower-beds, delightful to the eyes of the warden’s family, whose quarters looked on the free world outside; delightful, too, to the eyes of the legislative committees and distinguished visitors who came to preach and give advice to the men within the walls, who never saw the flowers.
Archie and the sheriff turned into the portico. In the shade, several men were lounging about. They wore the gray prison garb, but their clothes had somehow the effect of uniforms; they were clean, neatly brushed, and well fitted. They glanced up as Archie and the sheriff entered, and one of them sprang to his feet. On his cap Archie saw the words, “Warden’s Runner.” He was young, with a bright though pale face, and he stepped forward expectantly, thinking of a tip. He was about to speak, but suddenly his face fell, and he did not say what had been on his lips. He uttered, instead, a short, mistaken,
“Oh!”
The sheriff laughed, and then with the knowledge and familiarity men love so much to display, he went on:
“Thought we wanted to see the prison, eh? Well, I’ve seen it, and the boy here’ll see more’n he wants.”
The warden’s runner smiled perfunctorily and was about to turn away, when Bentley spoke again:
“How long you in for?” he asked.
“Life,” said the youth, and then went back to his bench. He did not look up again, though Archie glanced back at him over his shoulder.
“Trusties,” Bentley explained. “They’ve got a snap.”
In the office, where many clerks were busy, they waited; presently a sallow young man came out from behind a railing. The sheriff unlocked his handcuffs and blew on the red bracelet the steel had left about his wrist.
“Hot day,” said the sheriff, wiping his brow. The sallow clerk, on whom the official air sat heavily, ignored this and said:
“Let’s have your papers.”
He looked over the commitments with a critical legal scowl that seemed to pass finally on all that the courts had done, and signaled to a receiving guard.
“Good-by, Archie.” Bentley held out his hand.
“Good-by,” said Archie.
“Come on,” said the receiving guard, tossing his long club to his shoulder in a military way. The great steel door in the guard-room swung open; the guard sitting lazily in a worn chair at the double inner gates threw back the lever, and the receiving guard and Archie entered the yard.
It was a large quadrangle, surrounded by the ugly prison houses, with the chapel and the administration building in the center. Archie glanced about, and presently he discerned in the openings between the buildings companies of men, standing at ease. A whistle blew heavily, the companies came to attention, and then began to march across the yard. They marched in sets of twos, with a military scrape and shuffle, halted now and then to dress their intervals, marked time, then went on, massed together in the lock-step. As they passed, the men looked at Archie, some of them with strange smiles. But Archie knew none of them; not Delaney, with the white hair; not the Pole, who had been convicted of arson; not the Kid, nor old Deacon Sammy, who still wore his gold-rimmed glasses, nor Harry Graves. Their identity was submerged, like that of all the convicts in that prison, like that of all the forgotten prisoners in the world. The men marched by, company after company, until enough to make a regiment, two regiments, had passed them. A guard led Archie across the yard to the administration building. As they entered, a long, lean man, whose lank legs stretched from his easy chair half-way across the room, it seemed, to cock their heels on a desk, turned and looked at them. He was smoking a cigar very slowly, and he lifted his eyelids heavily. His eyes were pale blue—for some reason Archie shuddered.
“Here’s a fresh fish, Deputy,” said the guard.
The deputy warden of the prison, Ball, flecked the ashes from his cigar.
“Back again, eh?” he said.
Archie stared, and then he said:
“I’ve never stirred before.”
“The hell you haven’t,” said the deputy. “The bull con don’t go in this dump! I know you all!” The receiving guard looked Archie over, trying to recall him.
The deputy warden let his heavy feet fall to the floor, leaned forward, took a cane from his desk, got up, hooked the cane into the awkward angle of his left elbow, and shambled into the rear office, his long legs unhinging with a strange suggestion of the lock-step he was so proud of being able to retain in the prison by an evasion of the law. A convict clerk heaved an enormous record on to his high desk, then in a mechanical way he dipped a pen into the ink, and stood waiting.
“What’s your name?” asked the deputy.
Archie told him.
“Age?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Father and mother living?”
“Yes.”
“Who shall we notify if you die while you’re with us?”
Archie started; and the deputy laughed.
“Notify them.”
“Ever convicted before? No? Why, Koerner, you really must not lie to me like that!”
When the statistical questions were finished the deputy said:
“Now, Koerner, you got a stretch in the sentence; you’ll gain a month’s good time if you behave yourself; don’t talk; be respectful to your superiors; mind the rules; you can write one letter a month, have visitors once a month, receive all letters of proper character addressed to you. Your number is 48963. Take him and frisk him, Jimmy.”
The deputy warden hooked his cane over his arm and shambled out. Archie watched him, strangely fascinated. Then the guard touched him on the shoulder, tossed a bundle of old clothing over his arm, and said:
“This way.”
They made him bathe, then the barber shaved him, and he donned his prison clothes, which were of gray like those worn by the trusties he had seen at the gate of the prison. But the clothes did not fit him; the trousers were too tight at the waist and far too long, and they took a strange and unaccountable shape on him, the shape, indeed, of the wasted figure of an old convict who had died of consumption in the hospital two days before.
The guard took Archie to the dining-room, deserted now, and he sat down at one of the long tables and ate his watery soup and drank the coffee made of toasted bread—his first taste of the “boot-leg” he had heard his late companions talk about.
And then the idle house, stark and gloomy, with silent convicts ranged around the wall. On an elevated chair at one end, where he might have the scant light that fell through the one high window, an old convict, who once had been a preacher, read aloud. He read as if he enjoyed the sound of his own voice, but few of the prisoners listened. They sat there stolidly, with heavy, hardened faces. Some dozed, others whispered, others, whom the prison had almost bereft of reason, simply stared. The idle house was still, save for the voice of the reader and the constant coughing of a convict in a corner. Archie, incapable, like most of them, of concentrated attention, sat and looked about. He was dazed, the prison stupor was already falling heavily on his mind, and he was passing into that state of mental numbness that made the blank in his life when he was in the workhouse with Mason. He thought of Mason for a while, and wondered what his fate and that of Dillon had been; he thought of Gusta, and of his mother and father, of Gibbs and Curly, wondering about them all; wondered about that strange life, already dim and incredible, he had so lately left in what to convicts is represented by the word “outside.” He wished that he had been taken with Mason and Dillon. Then he thought of Kouka—thought of everything but the theft of the revolver, which bore so small a relation to his real life.
The entrance of a contractor brought diversion. The contractor, McBride, a man with a red face and closely-cropped white hair, smoking a cigar the aroma of which was eagerly sniffed in by the convicts, came with the receiving guard. At the guard’s command, Archie stood up, and the contractor, narrowing his eyes, inspected him through the smoke of his cigar. After a while he nodded and said:
“He’ll do—looks to me like he could make bolts. Ever work at a machine?” he suddenly asked.
Archie shook his head.
“Put him on Bolt B,” said the contractor; “he can learn.”
The day ended, somehow; the evening came, with supper in the low-ceiled, dim dining-hall, then the cells.
“You’ll lock in G6,” said the guard.
Archie marched to the cell-house, where, inside the brick shell, the cells rose, four tiers of them. The door locked on Archie, and he looked about the bare cell where he was to spend a year. For an hour, certain small privileges were allowed; favored convicts, in league with officials, peddled pies and small fruits at enormous commissions; somewhere a prisoner scraped a doleful fiddle. Near by, a guard haggled with a convict who worked in the cigar shop and stole cigars for the guard to sell on the outside. The guard, it seemed, had recently raised his commission from fifty to sixty per cent., and the convict complained. But when the guard threatened to report him for his theft, the convict gave in.
At seven o’clock the music ceased, and hall permits expired. Then there was another hour of the lights, when some of the convicts read. Then, at eight, it grew suddenly dark and still. Presently Archie heard the snores of tired men. He could not sleep himself; his pallet of straw was alive with vermin; the stillness in the great cell-house was awful and oppressive; once in a while he heard some one, somewhere, from a near-by cell, sigh heavily. Now, he thought, he was doing his bit at last; “buried,” the guns called it. Finally, when the hope had all gone from his heart, he fell asleep.
The summer night fell, and the prison’s gray wall merged itself in the blackness; but it still shut off the great world outside from the little world inside. The guards came out and paced the walls with their rifles, halting now and then with their backs to the black forms of the cell-houses, and looked out over the city, where the electric lights blazed.