XX
The reason why Archie had not answered his father’s letter was a simple one. On that spring afternoon while Koerner and Marriott were sitting on the stoop, Archie, stripped to the waist, was hanging by his wrists from the ceiling of a dungeon, called a bull cell, in the cellar under the chapel, his bare feet just touching the floor. He had been hanging there for three days. At night he was let down and given a piece of bread and a cup of water, and allowed to lie on the floor, still handcuffed. At morning guards came, raised Archie, lifted him up, and chained his wrists to the bull rings. Later, Deputy Warden Ball sauntered by with his cane hooked over his arm, peered in through the bars, smiled, and said, in his peculiar soft voice:
“Well, Archie, my boy, had enough?”
McBride, the contractor, who had picked Archie out of the group of new convicts in the idle house the day after he arrived at the prison, had set him to work in a shop known as “Bolt B.” His work was to make iron bolts, and all day long, from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon, he stood with one foot on the treadle, sticking little bits of iron into the maw of the machine and snatching them out again. At dinner-time the convicts marched out of the shop, stood in close-locked ranks until the whistle blew, and then marched across the yard to the dining-room for their sky-blue, their bread, their molasses and their boot-leg. Archie had watched the seasons change in this yard, he had seen its grass-plot fade and the leaves of its stunted trees turn yellow, he had seen it piled with snow and ice; now it was turning green with spring, just like the world outside. Sometimes, as they passed, he caught a glimpse of the death-squad—the men who were being kept until they could be killed in the electric chair—taking their daily exercise, curiously enough, for the benefit of their health. This squad varied in numbers. Sometimes there were a dozen, then there would come a night of horror when the floor of the cell-house was deadened with saw-dust. The next day one would be missing; only eleven would be exercising for their health. Then would come other nights of horror, and the squad would decrease until there were but six. But soon it would begin to increase again, and the number would run up to the normal. Sometimes, in summer, the Sunday-school excursionists had an opportunity to see the death-squad. Archie had seen the children, held by a sick, morbid interest, shrink when the men marched by, as if they were something other than mere people.
Each evening Archie and the other convicts marched again to the dining-room, and ate bread and molasses; then they sat in their cells for an hour while the cell-house echoed with the twanging of guitars and banjos, mouth-organs, jews’-harps, accordeons, and the raucous voices of the peddlers—a hideous bedlam. Those who had hall-permits talked with one another, or with friendly guards. Sometimes, if the guard were “right,” he gave Archie a candle and permitted him to read after the lights were out.
All week-days were alike. On Sunday they went to chapel and listened to the chaplain talk about Christ, who, it was said, came to preach deliverance to the captives. The chaplain told the convicts they could save their souls in the world to which they would go when they died, if they believed on Christ. Archie did not understand what it was that he was expected to believe, any more than he had when the sky-pilot at the works had said very much the same thing. It could not be that they expected him to believe that Christ came to preach deliverance to captives such as he. So he paid no attention to the sky-pilot. He found it more interesting to watch the death-squad, who, as likely to go to that world before any of the others, were given seats in the front pews. Near the death-squad were several convicts in chains. They were considered to be extremely bad and greatly in need of religion. The authorities, it seemed, were determined to give them this religion, even if they had to hold them in chains while they did so. In the corners of the chapel, behind protecting iron bars, were guards armed with rifles, who vigilantly watched the convicts while the chaplain preached to them the religion of the gentle Nazarene. The chaplain said it was the religion of the gentle Nazarene, but in reality it was the religion of Moses, or sometimes that of Paul, and even of later men that he preached to the convicts rather than the religion of Jesus. The convicts did not know this, however. Neither did the chaplain.
Yes, the days were exactly alike, especially as to the work, for Archie was required to turn out hundreds of bolts a day; a minimum number was fixed, and this was called a “task.” If he did not do this task, he was punished. It was difficult to perform this task; only by toiling incessantly every minute could he succeed. And even then it was hard, for in addition to keeping his eye on his machine, he had to keep his eye on the pile of bolts beside him, for the other convicts would rat; that is, steal from his pile in order to lessen their own tasks. For those bolts that were spoiled, Archie was given no credit; every hour an inspector came around, looked the bolts over and threw out those that were defective. For this toil, which was unpaid and in which he took no pride and found no joy because it was ugly and without any result to him, Archie felt nothing but loathing. This feeling was common among all the men in the shop; they resorted to all sorts of devices to escape it; some of them allowed the machines to snip off the ends of their fingers so they could work no more; others found a friend in Sweeny, the confidence man who was serving a five-year sentence and was detailed as a steward in the hospital. When they were in the hospital, Sweeny would burn the end of a finger with acid, rub dirt on it, and when it festered, amputate the finger.
Belden, who worked a machine next to Archie, did that; but only as a last resort.
“It’s no use for me to learn this trade,” he said to Archie one day when the guard was at the other end of the shop.
“Why not?”
“’Cause I’ll be on the street in two months; my mouthpiece’s going to take my case to the Supreme Court, and he’s sure to have it reversed. All I got to do’s to raise a hundred and fifty case; I’ve written my mother, and she’s already saved up seventy-eight. There’s nothing to it. Me learn to make these damned bolts for McBride? I guess not!”
Belden talked a great deal about his case in the Supreme Court. Many of the convicts did that. They did everything to raise money for their lawyers. After Belden’s attorney had taken the case up, and failed, Belden made application for pardon; and this required more money. His mother was saving up again. But this failed also; then Belden feigned sickness, was sent to the hospital; and they all admired him for his success.
Archie was sick once, and after three sick calls—he was, in reality, utterly miserable and suffered greatly—the physician, who, like every one else in the penitentiary, was controlled by the contractors, gave in and sent him to the hospital. Though the hospital was a filthy place, Archie for two days enjoyed the rest he found there. Then Sweeny told him that the bed he occupied had not been changed since a consumptive had died in it the day before Archie arrived.
“You stick to that pad,” said Sweeny, “and the croakers’ll be peddling your stiff in a month.”
Sweeny was accounted very wise, as indeed he was; for he held his position by reason of his discovery that the doctor was supplying his brother, who kept a drugstore outside, with medicines, silk bandages, plasters and surgical instruments.
Archie recovered then and went back to Bolt B.
After his return things went better for a while, because, to his surprise, the Kid, of whom he had heard in the jail at home, was there working at the machine next to his. The Kid had been transferred to that shop because he had utterly demoralized Bolt A, where he had been working. The little pickpocket, indeed, had been tried on all kinds of work—in the broom factory, in the cigar factory, in the foundry, everywhere, but he could not long be tolerated anywhere. His presence was too diverting. He was taken from the broom shop because he amused himself at the expense of a country boy sent up for grand larceny, whom, as the country boy thought, he was teaching to be a prowler. In the cigar shop he made another unsophisticated boy think that he could teach him the secret of making “cluck,” or counterfeit money; and he went so far as to give him a can of soft gray earth, which the convict thought was crude silver, and some broken glass to give the metal the proper ring. The convict hid this rubbish in his cell and jealously guarded it; he was to be released in a month. For a while the warden employed the Kid about the office, but one day he said to one of the trusties, an old life man who had been in the prison twenty years, until his mind had weakened under the confinement:
“What do you want to stay around here for? Ain’t there other countries besides this?”
The old man sniggered in his silly way, then he went to the warden, and hanging his head with a demented leer said:
“Warden, the Kid said there’s other countries besides this.”
He stood, swaying like a doltish school-boy from side to side, grinning, with his tongue lolling over his lips.
The warden summoned the Kid.
“What do you mean,” he said, “putting notions in old Farlow’s head?”
The Kid was surprised.
“Oh, come off,” said the warden impatiently. “You know—telling him there were other countries besides this?”
“Oh!” said the Kid with sudden illumination. “Oh, now I know what you mean!” And he laughed. “He asked me where I was from and I told him Canada. Then he wanted to know if Canada was in this country, and I told him there were other countries besides this.”
“You’re too smart, Willie,” said the warden. “You’d better go back to the shops.”
They tried all the punishments, the paddle, the battery, the water-cure, the bull rings, but nothing availed to break the Kid’s spirit. Then he was put on a bolt machine.
There was a convict named Dalton working near Archie and the Kid. Dalton had but one thought left in his mind, and this was that when he got out he would go to where he had concealed a kit of burglar tools. He had been the victim of some earlier practical jokers in the penitentiary, and had had a locksmith fashion for him tools such as no burglar ever needed or used in a business in which a jimmy, a piece of broom-stick and creepers are all the paraphernalia necessary. Dalton still had fourteen years to serve.
“Well, Jack, how’s everything this morning?” the Kid would ask as soon as the guard went down to the other end of the shop.
“Oh, all right,” Dalton would reply. Then he would grow serious, grit his teeth, clench his fist for emphasis and say: “Just wait till I get home! By God, if any one springs that kit of mine, I’ll croak him!”
“Where’s the plant?” the Kid would ask. “In the jungle?”
“Oh, you’ll never find out!” Dalton would reply warily.
“Some of the hoosiers or the bulls are likely to spring it,” the Kid would suggest.
The possibility tortured Dalton.
“By God,” he could only say, “if they do—I’ll croak ’em!”
“I wouldn’t do that,” said the Kid. “Get Dutch here to take you out with a tribe of peter men; he can teach you to pour the soup. Can’t you get a little soup and some strings and begin with him now, Archie?”
“Sure,” said Archie, grinning, proud to be thus recognized.
“That’s the grift; we’ll nick the screw; and when you go home you’ll be ready to—”
“No,” said Dalton determinedly, “I’ve got them tools planted—but—”
“Why don’t you take him out with a swell mob of guns?” suggested Archie.
“Think he could stall for the dip?” asked the Kid. “What do you think, Jack?”
“I’ll stick to prowlin’,” said Dalton, shaking his head and muttering to himself.
“He’s stir simple,” remarked the Kid, not without pity.
But the Kid was tired of his new occupation.
“I don’t believe I’m a very good bolt-maker,” he said to Archie.
“You might cut off a finger, or get Sweeny—”
“Nix,” said the Kid. “Not for Willie. I’ll need my finger. I’d do a nice job of reefing a kick with a finger gone, wouldn’t I?” He looked at his fingers, rapidly stiffening under the rough, hard work.
“Didn’t I tell you to stop that spieling?” demanded a guard who had slipped up behind him.
The Kid gave the guard a look that expressed the contempt he felt for him better than any words.
“I’ll report you for insolence,” said the guard angrily.
“For what?” said the Kid.
“Insolence.”
“How could you?” asked the Kid calmly. “You couldn’t spell the word.”
The guard made a mark on his card.
“You’ll be stood out for that,” said the guard. The Kid’s face darkened, but he controlled himself. For he had another plan.
A few days later he said to Archie:
“Are you on to that inspector?”
“What for?” asked Archie.
“He’s boostin’ bolts.”
Archie thought of this for a long time. It took several days for him to realize a new idea. The inspector, in pretending to throw out defective bolts, threw out quite as many perfect ones. These were boxed, shipped and sold by the contractor, who pocketed the entire proceeds without reporting them to the authorities. The Kid had discovered this system after a week of experience in having his labor stolen from him, and the inspector, more and more greedy, had grown bolder, until now he was stealing large quantities of bolts; and the tasks of Archie and the Kid were becoming more and more impossible of performance. The Kid was silent for days; his brows contracted as he jumped nimbly up and down before his clanking machine. Then one day when McBride was in the shop the Kid obtained permission to speak to him.
“Mr. McBride,” he said, “I want a thousand dollars.”
McBride took his cigar from his lips, flecked some dust from his new top-coat, and a laugh spread over his rough red face.
“What’s the kid this time, Willie?”
“This is on the square,” said the Kid. “I want a thousand case, that’s all.”
McBride saw that he was serious for once.
“I’ll blow it off, if you don’t,” said the Kid.
“Blow what off?”
“The graft.”
“What graft?”
“The defectives—oh, you know!”
McBride turned ashen, then his face blazed suddenly with rage.
“I’ll report you for this insolence!”
“All right,” said the Kid, “I’ll report you for stealing. It ain’t moral, the sky-pilot says.”
Archie saw the Kid no more after that evening; he was “stood out” at roll-call; and in the way the news of the little insular world inclosed in the prison walls spreads among its inmates, he heard that the Kid had been given the paddle and had been hung up in the cellar. When his punishment was ended, he was transferred to the shoe shop and set to work making paper soles for shoes. But he did not work long. He soon conceived a plan which for two years was to baffle all the prison authorities, especially the physicians. He developed a disease of the nerves; he said it was the result of running a bolt machine and of his subsequent punishment. The theory he imparted to the doctors, in his innocent manner, was that the blows of the paddle with the hanging had bruised and stretched his spine.
The symptoms of the Kid’s strange affliction were these: he could not stand still for an instant; his nerves seemed entirely demoralized, his muscles beyond control. He would stand before the doctors and twitch and spasmodically shuffle his feet for hours, while the doctors, those on the prison staff and those from outside, held consultations. Opinions differed widely. Some said that the Kid was malingering, others that his spine was really affected. Day after day the doctors examined him; they tested the accommodation of the pupils of the eyes, they had him walk blindfolded, they tested his extremities with heat and cold, with needles, and with electricity. Then they seated him, had him cross his legs and struck him below the knee-cap, testing his reflex action. Strangely enough, his reflexes were defective.
“Bum gimp, eh, Doc?” he would say mournfully.
For a while, after the Kid had gone, Archie found it easier to accomplish his daily task, for the reason that the inspector did not throw out so many defective bolts. But McGlynn, the guard on Archie’s contract, disliked him and was ever ready to report him, and Archie, while he did not at all realize it and could not analyze it, developed the feeling within him that the system which the people, and the legislature, and the committee on penal and reformatory institutions, and the state board of charities had devised and were so proud of, was not a system at all, for the simple reason that it depended solely on men and had nothing else to depend on. And just as the judge, the jury-men, the prosecutor and the policemen were swayed by a thousand whims and prejudices and moved by countless influences of which they were unconscious, so the guards who held power over him were similarly swayed. For each demerit he lost standing, and demerits depended not on his conduct, but on the feelings of the guards. McGlynn disliked Archie because he was German. He gave him demerits for all sorts of things, and it was not long before Archie realized that he had already lost all his good time and would have to serve out the whole year. And then the inspector grew reckless and bold. McBride was greedy for profits, and in a few weeks the bolts under Archie’s machine were again disappearing as rapidly as ever, and his task was wholly beyond him. And then a dull, sullen stubbornness seized him, and one morning, in a fit of black rage, seeing the inspector throw out a dozen perfect bolts, he stopped work. The inspector looked up, then signaled the guard. McGlynn came.
“Get to work, you!” he said in a rage.
Archie looked at him sullenly.
“You hear?” yelled McGlynn, raising his voice above the din of the machines.
Archie did not move.
McGlynn took a step toward him, but when he saw the look in Archie’s eyes, he paused.
“Stand out, you toaster,” he said.
The next morning at seven o’clock Archie stood, with forty other convicts who had broken rules or were accused of breaking rules, in the prison court. This court was held every morning in the basement of the chapel to try infractions of the prison discipline. This basement of the chapel was known about the penitentiary as “the cellar,” and as the word was spoken it took on indeed a dark and sinister, one might almost say a subterranean significance. For in the cellar were the solitary, the bull rings, the ducking tub, the paddle,—all the instruments of torture. And in the cellar, too, was the court. Externally, it might have reminded Archie somewhat of the police court at home, as it reminded other convicts of other police courts. It was a small room made of wooden partitions, and in it, behind a rail, was a platform for the deputy warden. It may have reminded the convicts, too, of other courts in its pitiable line of accused, in its still more pitiable line of accusers. For there were guards grinning in petty triumph, awaiting the revenge they could vicariously and safely enjoy for the infractions which never could seem to their primitive, brutal minds other than personal slights and affronts.
This strange and amazing court, based on no law and owning no law, this court from which there was no appeal, whose judgments could not be reviewed, this court which could not err, was presided over by Deputy Warden Ball. He lay now loosely in his chair behind the railing, his long legs stretched before him, the soles of his big shoes protruding, his long arms hanging by his sides, rolling a cigar round and round between his long teeth blackened by nicotine. He lay there as if he had fallen apart, as if the various pieces of him, his feet and legs, his arms and hands, would have to be assembled before he could move again. But this impression of incoherence was wholly denied by his face. The lines about his mouth were those of a permanent smile that never knew humor; the eyes at the top of his long nose were small and glistened coldly, piercing through the broken, dry skin of his cheeks and eyelids like the points of daggers through leather scabbards. Such was the deputy warden, the real executive of the prison, the judge who could pronounce any sentence he might desire, decreeing medieval tortures and slow deaths, dooming bodies to pain, and the remnants of souls to hell, and, when he willed, inventing new tortures. Ball was at once the product and the unconscious victim of the system in which he was the most invaluable and indispensable factor. He had been deputy in the prison for twenty years, and he stood far above the mutations of politics. He might have been said to live in the protection of a civil service law of his own enactment. He ruled, indeed, by laws that were of his own enactment, and he enacted or repealed them as occasion or his mood suggested. He ruled this prison, whether on the bench in the court or scuffing loose-jointedly about the yard, the shops, or the cell-houses, with his cane dangling from the crotch of his elbow, speaking in a low, soft, almost caressing voice, the secret, perhaps, of his power. For his slow and passive demeanor and his slow, soft voice seemed to visiting boards, committees and officials all kindness; and he used it with the convicts, sometimes drawing them close to him, and laying his great hand on their shoulders or their heads, and speaking in a low tone of pained surprise and gentle reproach, just as he was speaking now to a white-haired and aged burglar, wearing the dirty stripes of the fourth grade.
“Why, Dan, what’s this I hear? I didn’t think it of you, old chap, no I didn’t. A little of the solitary, eh? What say? All right—if it must be.”
It took Ball half an hour to doom the men this morning, and even at the last, when Archie went forward, when Ball had glanced at the card whereon McGlynn’s report was written in his illiterate hand, he said:
“Ah, the Dutchman! Well, Archie, this is very bad. Down to the fourth grade, bread and water to-day,—and to-morrow back to work, my lad. Mind now!”
Archie changed his gray suit for the reddish brown and white stripes, he ate his bread and drank his water, and he went back to the bolt-shop. But he did not work. He would not answer McGlynn when he spoke to him. He set his jaw and was silent.
“What, again!” said Ball the next day. “Well, well, well! If you insist; give him the paddle, Jim.”
When court had adjourned, they took Archie into a small room near by. Across one end of this room was a huge bath-tub of wood; this, and all the utensils of torture, which in a kind of fiendish ingenuity of economy were concentrated in it, were water-worn and white. On the floor at the base of the tub were iron stocks. In these, when he had been stripped naked, perhaps for additional shame, Archie’s ankles were clamped. Then he was forced to bend forward, over the bath-tub, and was held there by guards while Ball stood by smoking. A burly negro, Jim, a convict with privileges—this privilege among others—beat him on the bare skin with a paddle of ashwood that had been soaked in hot water and dipped in white sand.
But Archie would not work.
The next morning Ball patted him on the head, and said:
“My dear boy! You are certainly foolish. He wants the water, Jim.”
Again they stripped him and forced him into the bath-tub. This tub had many and various devices, among them a block of wood, hollowed out on one side to fit a man’s chest if he sat in the tub, and as it could be moved back and forth in grooves along the top of the tub and fastened wherever need be, it could be made to fit any man and hold him in its vise against the end of the tub, in which quality of adjusting itself to the size of its victim it differed from the bed of Procrustes. And now they handcuffed Archie, fastened him in the tub, pressed the block against his broad, white, muscular chest, and while Ball and the guards stood by, the negro with the privileges, arrayed now in rubber coat and boots, turned a fierce slender stream of water from a short rubber hose in Archie’s face. Archie gasped, his mouth opened, and deftly the negro turned the fierce gushing stream into his mouth, where it hissed and foamed and gurgled, filling his throat and lungs, streaming down over his chin and breast. Archie’s lips turned blue; soon his face was blue.
“I guess that’ll do, Jim,” said Ball.
When Archie regained consciousness they sent him back to the bolt-shop.
But he would not work.
The next morning Ball showed again that tenderness that appealed so strongly to the humane gentlemen on the Prison Board.
“Why, Archie!” he said. “Why, Archie!” Then he paused, rolled his cigar about and said: “String him up, boys, until he’s ready to go back to work.”
After the guards had fastened his hands above his head in the bull rings, closed and locked the door of the cell and left him, Archie’s first thought was of Curly, who had gone through this same ordeal in another prison, and Archie found a compensation in thinking that he would have an experience to match Curly’s when next they met and sat around the fire in the sand-house or the fire in the edge of the woods. And then his thoughts ran back to the day when Curly had first told him of the bull rings; and he could see Curly as he told it—his eyes glazing, his face growing gray and ugly, his teeth clenching.
Archie remembered more; somehow, vividly, he saw Curly tying a rope to the running board on top of the freight-car, dangling it over the side and then letting himself down on it until he hung before the car door, the seal of which he quickly broke and unlocked; and the train running thirty miles an hour! No one else could “bust tags” this way; no one else had the nerve of Curly.
At first Archie found relief in changing his position. By raising himself on tiptoe he could ease the strain on his wrists; by hanging his weight from his wrists he could ease the strain on his feet. He did this many times; but he found no rest in either position. The handcuffs grew tight; they cut into his wrists like knives. His hands were beginning to go to sleep; they tingled, the darting needles stung and pricked and danced about. Then his hands seemed to have enlarged to a preposterous size, and they were icy cold. Presently he was filled with terror; he lost all sense of feeling in his arms. Rubbing his head against them, he found them cold; they were no longer his arms, but the arms of some one else. They felt like the arms of a corpse. An awful terror laid hold of him. In his insteps there was a mighty pain; his biceps ached; his neck ached, ached, ached to the bones of it; his back was breaking. The pain spread through his whole body, maddening him. With a great effort he tore and tugged and writhed, lifting one foot, then the other, then stamped. At last he hung there numb, limp, inert. In the cell it was dark and still. No sound could reach him from the outer world.
Some time—it was evening, presumably, for time was not in that cell—they came and let him down. A guard gave him a cup of water. He held forth his hand, groping after it; and he could not tell when his hand touched it. The cup fell, jangled against his handcuffs; the water was spilled, the tin cup rolled and rattled over the cement floor. And Archie wept, wild with disappointment. The guard, who was merciful, brought another cup and held it to Archie’s lips, and he drank it eagerly, the water bubbling at his lips as it had once, years ago, when he was a baby and his mother held water to his lips to drink.
Presently Ball came and stood looking at him through the little grated wicket in the door.
“Well, Archie, how goes it?” he said. “Had enough? Ready to go back to work?”
Archie looked at him a moment. His eyeballs, still protruding from the effects of the ducking-tub, gleamed in the light of the guard lantern. He looked at Ball, finally realized, and began to curse. At last he managed to say:
“I’ll croak you for this.”
Ball laughed.
“Well, good night, my lad,” he said.
Archie lay on a plank, the handcuffs still on him, all the night. In the morning they hung him up again.
The next day, and the next, and the next,—for seven days,—Archie hung in the bull rings. In the middle of the eighth day, after his head had been rolling and lolling about on his shoulders between his cold, swollen, naked arms, he suddenly became frantic, put forth a mighty effort, lifted himself, and began to bite his hands and his wrists, gnashing his teeth on the steel handcuffs, yammering like a maniac.
That evening, the evening of the eighth day, when the guard came and flashed his lamp on him, Archie’s body was hanging there, still, his chin on his breast. Down his arms the blood was trickling from the wounds he had made with his teeth. The guard set down his lantern, ran down the corridor, returned presently with Ball, and Jeffries, the doctor.
They lowered his body. The doctor bent his head to the white breast and listened.
“Take him to the hospital,” he said. “I guess he’s had about all he can stand.”
“God, he had nerve!” said Ball, looking at the body. “He wouldn’t give in.”
He shambled away, his head bent. He was perplexed. He had not failed since—when was it?—since number 13993 had—died of heart failure, in the hospital, five years before.