THE HOSPITAL (continued 2)

The other morning a big, square-shouldered tramp was following the sheriff in a lazy, shuffling manner. There was no hat on his long, dishevelled mop of reddish hair; his beard was of enormous proportions; his face was brick red, as well as the hands, from dirt and exposure to the air. A coat and trousers which almost dropped from his body, so ragged were they; no shirt, no underwear, and a pair of shoes through which his toes peeped smilingly, completed his wardrobe. A sudden gust of wind would have divested him of all covering.

Half an hour later I happened to pass near the head keeper's desk, and I could hardly believe my eyes when I beheld that tramp. In his case the transformation was highly creditable to prison methods. They had clipped his hair, cut his beard, given him a bath, covered him with a striped shirt and a striped suit, and he was standing in brand-new, prison-made shoes. He looked indeed like a gentleman as compared with his former wild, dirty, disreputable and pitiful appearance.

On Sunday droves of visitors come to the island on the 23rd Street boat. The women are more numerous than the men; poorly dressed women are in the majority; often flashily dressed women with expensive fur coats and stylish hats are seen elbowing old and homely women wearing shawls and with babies on their arms. Almost everybody carries packages of fruit to the inmates. Little boys and girls often accompany the women, and handkerchiefs are often raised to wipe away tears. It is a tragic, fateful, unhappy procession.

XXV

The first and the last week seem longest in the term of imprisonment. During the rest of the time the hours pass in swift succession, as the work and the regular hours help to shorten the time; there is a spirit of patience, and the mind becomes more and more introspective and philosophical.

But in the last week all the thoughts, the plans, the ambitions, the discoveries of a new future, seem to be concentrated. The minutes drag by with a laborious and torpid slowness, and there is an intensity of time which seems to crowd sixty hours into one single hour by the clock. The ordinary patient, often of a cheerful habit of mind, is of a sudden transformed into a cranky, impatient, unruly, violent attitude.

During that last week I very nearly got into trouble, for the first time in my ten months of imprisonment "with good behaviour;" and this when an impertinent answer might have kept me two months longer within this barred prison.

A keeper known and hated for his brutal and insulting attitude towards the prisoners was relieving our own hospital keeper during the lunch hour. He was watching the prisoners file into the room at the opposite end of the hospital to wait for the arrival of the dentist. A belated man came in holding a handkerchief close to his mouth as if he were suffering from an agonizing toothache.

The keeper spoke: "Who is that dirty bum?"

"What do you mean?" I said.

"I mean who is that dirty bum who just came in?" he repeated.

"I don't understand you," I rejoined, angry at his remark.

"I see you're rather particular about expressions," he said in a surprised tone.

"Yes," I retorted, "and I don't see what right you have to call an inoffensive convict a dirty bum, when if it wasn't for us dirty bums you wouldn't be sitting here now."

The situation was saved by an old Irish keeper who added laughingly, "That's right, you wouldn't be getting twenty-five per a week to keep a chair from flying out of a window, if it wasn't for those dirty bums."

XXVI

Only after a long while did the influence, the pernicious influx of the thought waves emanating from hundreds of convict minds, begin to play on my mind. I never imagined that convict habits and thoughts could touch me or have any effect on my inmost thoughts, my better self. During the day, in fact, when the conscious mind was active, nothing seemed to effect my habitual, set and crystallized character, my old trend of mental, moral and intellectual associations.

Only in the last month, during my sleep or half-sleep, did I recognize the ascendency of the magnetic, unhealthy, collective thoughts of the prison. They arose slowly, like poisonous miasmas, insidious and permeating, with a persistency that amazed my startled and thoroughly alarmed consciousness.

Thoughts, images, desires, which I had been used from my youth and all through my life to consider unhealthy, degenerate or simply unworthy of my attention, came sneaking into my subconscious mind, in the form of disgusting, appalling, terrifying dreams. The back yard of my mind had begun to register and absorb all the wretched, unclean, monstrous, unmentionable yearnings, desires and actions of the collective prison dreams; it was inhaling the moral stench which arose as from a "cloaca maxima."

I thought of all the weak, unbalanced, receptive young minds which must have been corrupted by this intangible, powerful magnetism; and of how this unnatural, abnormal, degrading prison life began in any absorbent or indifferent temperament a slow corrosion and led to a complete and effective disruption and destruction of all moral and intellectual integrity.

I felt as if hundreds of unspeakable and undreamed of sins, taking shape of gliding snakes, noiseless and black, with glittering eyes and fiery tongues, were descending upon me, winding round my body and my legs and arms, fastening their pin-like fangs in my flesh to poison my brain and body.

And I thanked my stars and my fate and my power of will when the last night of my sentence arrived to relieve me of an oppressive, suffocating succession of nightmares.

I did not sleep one solitary wink, but how rosy, exquisite, exhilarating, radiant, were the thoughts that filled me on that prison cot, how transparent those bars seemed on that last night, never to be forgotten, like the first night I spent in that horrible dungeon.

XXVII

I am finally called downstairs. The sun streaming through the narrow bars gives the gloomy prison almost a bright appearance. Hastily I put on my street clothes. I feel like a man putting on a strange, exotic costume for a fancy dress ball; the collar and necktie seem to choke me with a kind of joy and affection. Accompanied by my lawyer, I walk out of the fateful gates, and then I turn to look back, and to glance upwards to the hospital windows where the patients and the old keeper wave a friendly salute and farewell.

Friends are waiting to greet me at the other side of the river. I look in wonder and amaze at the people in the streets. Everything is so interesting; the most commonplace and sordid sights are delightful and picturesque. The men; the women, with their wonderful clothes; the sky, the houses, the cars, the signs, everything, seem so novel, so friendly; every minute so precious, so full of surprises and possibilities.

I have grown fat and pale in prison, but my spirit is as light and quick as the spirit of a humming bird. Everybody greets me as a traveller returned from a strange, unknown, and very distant land—and yet all the while I have been living in the very heart of the metropolis. Everybody seems to realize and to reassure me that the acceptance of a pardon would have been a grievous mistake. To refuse it meant a great sacrifice, but making that sacrifice has confirmed a general suspicion that unfair methods, dangerous to American traditions, have been used against me.

The day of reckoning will come in time. Meanwhile, how beautiful, perfect, intoxicating is the sense of untrammelled liberty! It repays me for many a dark, tragic hour.