It Is Never Too Late to Mend — Chapter X, part 2

Next day the governor of the jail came suddenly into the cell and put to Robinson several questions, which he answered with great affability;

then, turning on his heel, said bruskly, “Have you anything to say to me?

” “Yes, sir, if you please.

” “Out with it then, my man,” said the governor impatiently.

“Sir, I was condemned to hard labor; now I wanted to ask you when my hard labor is to begin, because I have not been put upon anything yet.

” “We are kinder to you than the judges then, it seems.

” “Yes, sir!

but I am not naturally lazy, and--” “A little hard work would amuse you just now?

” “Indeed, sir, I think it would; I am very much depressed in spirits.

” “You will be worse before you are better.

” “Heaven forbid!

I think if you don't give me something to do I shall go out of my mind soon, sir.

” “That is what they all say!

You will be put on hard labor, I promise you, but not when it suits you.

We'll choose the time.

” And the governor went out with a knowing smile upon his face.

The thief sat himself down disconsolately, and the heavy hours, like leaden waves, seemed to rise and rise, and roll over his head and suffocate him, and weigh him down, down, down to bottomless despair.

At length, about the tenth day, this human being's desire to exchange a friendly word with some other human creature became so strong that in the chapel during service he scratched the door of his sentry-box, and whispered, “Mate, whisper me a word, for pity's sake.

” He received no answer; but even to have spoken himself relieved his swelling soul for a minute or two.

Half an hour later four turnkeys came into his cell, and took him down stairs and confined him in a pitch-dark dungeon.

The prisoner whose attention he had tried to attract in chapel had told to curry favor, and was reported favorably for the same.

The darkness in which Robinson now lay was not like the darkness of our bedrooms at night, in which the outlines of objects are more or less visible; it was the frightful darkness that chilled and crushed the Egyptians soul and body; it was a darkness that might be felt.

This terrible and unnatural privation of all light is very trying to all God's creatures, to none more so than to man, and among men it is most dangerous and distressing to those who have imagination and excitability.

Now Robinson was a man of this class, a man of rare capacity, full of talent and the courage and energy that vent themselves in action, but not rich in the tough fortitude which does little, feels little and bears much.

When they took him out of the black hole after six hours' confinement he was observed to be white as a sheet, and to tremble violently all over, and in this state at the word of command he crept back all the way to his cell, his hand to his eyes, that were dazzled by what seemed to him bright daylight, his body shaking, while every now and then a loud, convulsive sob burst from his bosom.

The governor happened to be on the corridor, looking down over the rails as Robinson passed him.

He said to him, with a victorious sneer, “You won't be refractory in chapel again in a hurry.

” “No,” said the thief, in a low, gentle voice, despairingly.

The day after Robinson was put in the black hole the surgeon came his rounds.

He found him in a corner of his cell with his eyes fixed on the floor.

The man took no notice of his entrance.

The surgeon went up to him and shook him rather roughly.

Robinson raised his heavy eyes and looked stupidly at him.

The surgeon laid hold of him, and placing a thumb on each side of his eye, inspected that organ fully.

He then felt his pulse; this done, he went out with the warder.

Making his report to the governor, he came in turn to Robinson.

“No. 19 is sinking.

” “Oh!

is he?

Fry” (turning to a warder), “what has 19's treatment been?

” “Been in his cell, sir, without labor since he came.

Blackhole yesterday, for communicating in chapel.

” “What is the matter with him?

” “Doctor says he is sinking.

” “What the devil do you mean by his sinking?

” “Well, sir,” replied the surgeon, with a sort of dry deference, “he is dying--that is what I mean.

” “Oh, he is dying, is he; d--n him, we'll stop that.

Here, Fry, take No. 19 out into the garden, and set him to work.

And put him on the corridors to-morrow.

” “Is he to be let talk to us, sir?

” “Humph!

yes!

” Robinson was taken out into the garden; it was a small piece of ground that had once been a yard; it was inclosed within walls of great height, and to us would have seemed a cheerless place for horticulture, but to Robinson it appeared the garden of Eden.

He gave a sigh of relief and pleasure, but the next moment his countenance fell.

“They won't let me stay here!

” Fry took him into the center of the garden, and put a spade into his hand.

“Now you dig this piece,” said he in his dry, unfriendly tone, “and if you have time cut the edges of this grass path square.

” The words were scarcely out of his mouth before Robinson drove the spade into the soil with all the energy of one of God's creatures escaping from system back to nature.

Fry left him in the garden after making him pull down his vizor, for there was one more prisoner working at some distance.

Robinson set to with energy, and dug for the bare life.

It was a sort of work he knew very little about, and a gardener would have been disgusted at his ridges, but he threw his whole soul into it and very soon had nearly completed his task.

Having been confined so long without exercise his breath was short, and he perspired profusely; but he did not care for that.

“Oh, how sweet this is after being buried alive,” cried he, and in went the spade again.

Presently he was seized with a strong desire to try the other part of his task, the more so as it required more skill and presented a difficulty to overcome.

A part of the path had been shaved and the knippers lay where they had been last used.

Robinson inspected the recent work with an intelligent eye, and soon discovered traces of a white line on one side of the path, that served as a guide to the knippers.

“Oh!

I must draw a straight line,” said Robinson out loud, indulging himself with the sound of a human voice.

“But how?

can you tell me that,” he inquired of a gooseberry bush that grew near.

The words were hardly out of his mouth before, peering about in every direction, he discovered an iron spike with some cord wrapped round it and, not far off, a piece of chalk.

He pounced on them, and fastening the spike at the edge of the path attempted to draw a line with the chalk, using the string as a ruler.

Not succeeding, he reflected a little, and the result was that he chalked several feet of the line all round until it was all white; then with the help of a stake, which he took for his other terminus, he got the chalked string into a straight line just above the edge of the grass.

Next pressing it tightly down with his foot, he effected a white line on the grass.

He now removed the string, took the knippers, and following his white line, trimmed the path secundum artem.

“There,” said Robinson, to the gooseberry-bush, but not very loud for fear of being heard and punished, “I wonder whether that is how the gardeners do it.

I think it must be.

” He viewed his work with satisfaction, then went back to his digging, and as he put the finishing stroke Fry came to bring him back to his cell.

It was bedtime.

“I never worked in a garden before,” began Robinson, “so it is not so well done as it might be, but if I was to come every day for a week, I think I could master it.

I did not know there was a garden in this prison.

If ever I build a prison there shall be a garden in it as big as Belgrave Square.

” “You are precious fond of the sound of your own voice, No. 19,” said Fry dryly.

“We are not forbidden to speak to the warders, are we?

” “Not at proper times.

” He threw open cell-door 19, and Robinson entered.

Before he could close the door Robinson said, “Good-night and thank you.

” “G'night,” snarled Fry sullenly, as one shamed against his will into a civility.

Robinson lay awake half the night, and awoke the next morning rather feverish and stiff, but not the leaden thing he was the day before.

A feather turns a balanced scale.

This man's life and reason had been engaged in a drawn battle with three mortal enemies--solitude, silence and privation of all employment.

That little bit of labor and wholesome thought, whose paltry and childish details I half blush to have given you, were yet due to my story, for they took a man out of himself, checked the self-devouring process, and helped elastic nature to recover herself this bout.

The next day Robinson was employed washing the prison.

The next he got two hours in the garden again, and the next the trades'-master was sent into his cell to teach him how to make scrubbing-brushes.

The man sat down and was commencing a discourse when Robinson interrupted him politely: “Sir, let me see you work, and watch me try to do the same, and correct me.

” “With all my heart,” said the trades'-master.

He remained about half an hour with his pupil, and when he went out he said to one of the turnkeys, “There is a chap in there that can pick up a handicraft as a pigeon picks up peas.

” The next day the surgeon happened to look in.

He found Robinson as busy as a bee making brushes, pulled his eye open again, felt his pulse, and wrote something down in his memorandum-book.

He left directions with the turnkey that No. 19 should be kept employed, with the governor's permission.

Robinson's hands were now full; he made brushes, and every day put some of them to the test upon the floor and walls of the building.

It happened one day as he was doing housemaid in corridor B, that he suddenly heard unwonted sounds issue from a part of the premises into which he had not yet been introduced, the yard devoted to hard labor.

First he heard a single voice shouting: that did not last long; then a dead silence; then several voices, among which his quick ear recognized Fry's and the governor's. He could see nothing; the sounds came from one of the hard-labor cells.

Robinson was surprised and puzzled.

What were these sounds that broke the silence of the living tomb?

An instinct told him it was no use asking a turnkey, so he devoured his curiosity and surprise as best he might.

The very next day, about the same hour, both were again excited by noises from the same quarter equally unintelligible.

He heard a great noise of water slashed in bucketsful against a wall, and this was followed by a sort of gurgling that seemed to him to come from a human throat; this latter, however, was almost drowned in an exulting chuckle of several persons, among whom he caught the tones of a turnkey called Hodges and of the governor himself.

Robinson puzzled and puzzled himself, but could not understand these curious sounds, and he could see nothing except a quantity of water running out of one of the labor cells, and coursing along till it escaped by one of the two gutters that drained the yard.

Often and often Robinson meditated on this, and exerted all his ingenuity to conceive what it meant.

His previous jail experience afforded him no clew, and as he was one of those who hate to be in the dark about anything this new riddle tortured him.

However, the prison was generally so dead dumb and gloomy that upon two such cheerful events as water splashing and creatures laughing he could not help crowing a little out of sympathy without knowing why.

The next day, as Robinson was working in the corridor, the governor came in with a gentleman whom he treated with unusual and marked respect.

This gentleman was the chairman of the quarter-sessions, and one of those magistrates who had favored the adoption of the present system.

Mr. Williams inspected the prison; was justly pleased with its exquisite cleanness; he questioned the governor as to the health of the prisoners, and received for answer that most of them were well, but that there were some exceptions; this appeared to satisfy him.

He went into the labor-yard, looked at the cranks, examined the numbers printed on each in order to learn their respective weights, and see that the prisoners were not overburdened.

Went with the governor into three or four cells, and asked the prisoners if they had any complaint to make.

The unanimous answer was “No!

” He then complimented the governor--and drove home to his own house, Ashtown Park.

There, after dinner, he said to a brother magistrate, “I inspected the jail to-day; was all over it.

” The next morning Fry, the morose, came into Robinson's cell with a more cheerful countenance than usual.

Robinson noticed it.

“You are put on the crank,” said Fry.

“Oh!

am I?

” “Of course you are.

Your sentence was hard labor, wasn't it?

I don't know why you weren't sent on a fortnight ago.

” Fry then took him out into the labor-yard, which he found perforated with cells about half the size of his hermitage in the corridor.

In each of these little quiet grottoes lurked a monster, called a crank.

A crank is a machine of this sort--there springs out of a vertical post an iron handle, which the workman, taking it by both hands, works round and round, as in some country places you may have seen the villagers draw a bucket up from a well.

The iron handle goes at the shoulder into a small iron box at the top of the post; and inside that box the resistance to the turner is regulated by the manufacturer, who states the value of the resistance outside in cast-iron letters.

Thus: 5-lb.

crank.

7-lb.

crank.

10, 12, etc. , etc. “Eighteen hundred revolutions per hour,” said Mr. Fry, in his voice of routine, and “you are to work two hours before dinner.

” So saying he left him, and Robinson, with the fear of punishment before him, lost not a moment in getting to work.

He found the crank go easy enough at first, but the longer he was at it the stiffer it seemed to turn.

And after about four hundred turns he was fain to breathe and rest himself.

He took three minutes' rest, then at it again.

All this time there was no taskmaster, as in Egypt, nor whipper-up of declining sable energy, as in Old Kentucky.

So that if I am so fortunate as to have a reader aged ten, he is wondering why the fool did not confine his exertions to saying he had made the turns.

My dear, it would not do.

Though no mortal oversaw the thief at his task, the eye of science was in that cell and watched every stroke and her inexorable finger marked it down.

In plain English, on the face of the machine was a thing like a chronometer with numbers set all round and a hand which, somehow or other, always pointed to the exact number of turns the thief had made.

The crank was an autometer, or self-measurer, and in that respect your superior and mine, my little drake.

This was Robinson's first acquaintance with the crank.

The tread-wheel had been the mode in his time; so by the time he had made three thousand turns he was rather exhausted.

He leaned upon the iron handle and sadly regretted his garden and his brushes; but fear and dire necessity were upon him; he set to his task and to work again.

“I won't look at the meter again, for it always tells me less than I expect.

I'll just plow on till that beggar comes.

I know he will come to the minute.

” Sadly and doggedly he turned the iron handle, and turned and turned again; and then he panted and rested a minute, and then doggedly to his idle toil again.

He was now so fatigued that his head seemed to have come loose, he could not hold it up, and it went round and round and round with the crank-handle.

Hence it was that Mr. Fry stood at the mouth of the den without the other seeing him.

“Halt,” said Fry.

Robinson looked up, and there was the turnkey inspecting him with a discontented air.

“I'm done,” thought Robinson, “here he is as black as thunder--the number not right, no doubt.

” “What are ye at,” growled Fry.

“You are forty over,” and the said Fry looked not only ill-used but a little unhappy.

Robinson's good behavior had disappointed the poor soul.

This Fry was a grim oddity; he experienced a feeble complacency when things went wrong--but never else.

The thief exulted, and was taken back to his cell.

Dinner came almost immediately.

Four ounces of meat instead of three; two ounces less bread, but a large access of potatoes, which more than balanced the account.

The next day Robinson was put on the crank again, but not till the afternoon.

He had finished about half his task, when he heard at some little distance from him a faint moaning.

His first impulse was to run out of his cell and see what was the matter, but Hodges and Fry were both in the yard, and he knew that they would report him for punishment upon the least breach of discipline.

So he turned and turned the crank, with these moans ringing in his ears and perplexing his soul.

Finding they did not cease, he peeped cautiously into the yard, and there he saw the governor himself as well as Hodges and Fry.

All three were standing close to the place whence these groans issued, and with an air of complete unconcern.

But presently the groans ceased, and then mysteriously enough the little group of disciplinarians threw off their apathy.

Hodges and Fry went hastily to the pump with buckets, which they filled, and then came back to the governor; the next minute Robinson heard water dashed repeatedly against the walls of the cell, and then the governor laughed, and Hodges laughed, and even the gloomy Fry vented a brief grim chuckle.

And now Robinson quivered with curiosity as he turned his crank, but there was no means of gratifying it.

It so happened, however, that some ten minutes later the governor sent Hodges and Fry to another part of the prison, and they had not been gone long before a message came to himself, on which he went hastily out, and the yard was left empty.

Robinson's curiosity had reached such a pitch that notwithstanding the risk he ran--for he knew the governor would send back to the yard the very first disengaged officer he met--he could not stay quiet.

As the governor closed the gate he ran with all speed to the cell, he darted in, and then the thief saw what made the three honest men laugh so.

He saw it, and started back with a cry of dismay, for the sight chilled the felon to the bone.

A lad about fifteen years of age was pinned against the wall in agony by a leathern belt passed round his shoulders and drawn violently round two staples in the wall.

His arms were jammed against his sides by a straight waistcoat fastened with straps behind, and those straps drawn with the utmost severity.

But this was not all.

A high leathern collar a quarter of an inch thick squeezed his throat in its iron grasp.

His hair and his clothes were drenched with water which had been thrown in bucketsful over him, and now dripped from him on the floor.

His face was white, his lips livid, his eyes were nearly glazed, and his teeth chattered with cold and pain.

A more unprincipled man than Robinson did not exist; but burglary and larceny do not extinguish humanity in a thinking rascal as resigning the soul to system can extinguish it in a dull dog.

“Oh, what is this!

” cried Robinson, “what are the villains doing to you?

” He received no answer; but the boy's eyes opened wide, and he turned those glazing eyes, the only part of his body he could turn, toward the speaker.

Robinson ran up to him, and began to try and loosen him.

At this the boy cried out, almost screaming with terror, “Let me alone!

let me alone!

They'll give it me worse if you do, and they'll serve you out, too!

” “But you will die, boy.

Look at his poor lips!

” “No, no, no!

I shan't die!

No such luck!

” cried the boy impatiently and wildly.

“Thank you for speaking kind to me.

Who are you?

tell me quick, and go.

I am ---- Josephs, No. 15, Corridor A. ” “I am Robinson, No. 19, Corridor B. ” “Good-bye, Robinson, I shan't forget you.

Hark, the door!

Go!

go!

go!

go!

go!

” Robinson was already gone.

He had fled at the first click of a key in the outward door, and darted into his cell at the moment Fry got into the yard.

An instinct of suspicion led this man straight to Robinson's hermitage.

He found him hard at work.

Fry scrutinized his countenance, but Robinson was too good an actor to betray himself; only when Fry passed on he drew a long breath.

What he had seen surprised as well as alarmed him, for he had always been told the new system discouraged personal violence of all sorts; and in all his experience of the old jails he had never seen a prisoner abused so savagely as the young martyr in the adjoining cell.

His own work done, he left for his own dormitory.

He was uneasy, and his heart was heavy for poor Josephs; but he dared not even cast a look toward his place of torture, for the other executioners had returned, and Fry followed grim at his heels like a mastiff dogging a stranger out of the premises.

That evening Robinson spent in gloomy reflections and forebodings.

“I wish I was in the hulks or anywhere out of this place,” said he.

As for Josephs, the governor, after inspecting his torture for a few minutes, left the yard again with his subordinates, and Josephs was left alone with his great torture for two hours more; then Hodges came in and began to loose him, swearing at him all the time for a little rebellious monkey that gave more trouble than enough.

The rebellious monkey made no answer, but crawled slowly away to his dungeon, shivering in his drenched clothes, stiff and sore, his bones full of pain, his heart full of despondency.

Robinson had now eight thousand turns of the crank per day, and very hard work he found it; but he preferred it to being buried alive all day in his cell; and warned by Josephs' fate, he went at the crank with all his soul, and never gave them an excuse for calling him “refractory.

” It happened, however, one day, just after breakfast, that he was taken with a headache and shivering; and not getting better after chapel, but rather worse, he rang his bell and begged to see the surgeon.

The surgeon ought to have been in the jail at this hour.

He was not, though, and as he had been the day before, and was accustomed to neglect the prisoners for any one who paid better, he was not expected this day.

Soon after Fry came to the cell and ordered Robinson out to the crank.

Robinson told him he was too ill to work.

“I must have the surgeon's authority for that, before I listen to it,” replied Fry, amateur of routine.

“But he is not in the jail, or you would have it.

” “Then he ought to be.

” “Well, is it my fault he's shirking his duty?

Send for him, and you'll see he will tell you I am not fit for the crank to-day; my head is splitting.

” “Come, no gammon, No. 19; it is the crank or the jacket, or else the black hole.

So take which you like best.

” Robinson rose with a groan of pain and despondency.

“It is only eight thousand words you have got to say to it, and they are not many for such a tongue as yours.

” At the end of the time Fry came to the mouth of the labor-cell with a grim chuckle.

“He will never have done his number this time.

” He found Robinson kneeling on the ground, almost insensible, the crank-handle convulsively grasped in his hands.

Fry's first glance was at this figure, that a painter might have taken for a picture of labor overtasked; but this was neither new nor interesting to Fry.

He went eagerly to examine the meter of the crank--there lay his heart, such as it was--and to his sorrow he found that No. 19 had done his work before he broke down.

What it cost the poor fever-stricken wretch to do it can easier be imagined than described.

They assisted Robinson to his cell, and that night he was in a burning fever.

The next day the surgeon happened by some accident to be at his post, and prescribed change of diet and medicines for him.

“He would be better in the infirmary.

” “Why?

” said the governor.

“More air.

” “Nonsense, there is plenty of air here.

There is a constant stream of air comes in through this,” and he pointed to a revolving cylinder in the window constructed for that purpose.

“You give him the right stuff, doctor,” said Hawes jocosely, “and he won't slip his wind this time.

” The surgeon acquiesced according to custom.

It was not for him to contradict Hawes, who allowed him to attend the jail or neglect it, according to his convenience, i. e. , to come three or four times a week at different hours, instead of twice every day at fixed hours.

It was two days after this that the governor saw Hodges come out of a cell laughing.

“What are ye grinning at?

” said he, in his amiable way.

“No. 19 is light-headed, sir, and I have been listening to him.

It would make a cat laugh,” said Hodges apologetically.

He knew well enough the governor did not approve of laughing in the jail.

The governor said nothing, but made a motion with his hand, and Hodges opened cell 19 and they both went in.

No. 19 lay on his back flushed and restless with his eyes fixed on vacancy.

He was talking incessantly and without sequence.

I should fail signally were I to attempt to transfer his words to paper.

I feel my weakness and the strength of others who in my day have shown a singular power of fixing on paper the volatile particles of frenzy; however, in a word, the poor thief was talking as our poetasters write, and amid his gunpowder, daffodils, bosh and other constellations there mingled gleams of sense and feeling that would have made you and me very sad.

He often recurred to a girl he called Mary, and said a few gentle words to her; then off again into the wildest flights.

While Mr. Hawes and his myrmidons were laughing at him, he suddenly fixed his eyes on some imaginary figure on the opposite wall and began to cry out loudly, “Take him down.

Don't you see you are killing him?

The collar is choking him!

See how White he is!

His eyes stare!

The boy will die!

Murder!

murder!

murder!

I can't bear to see him die.

” And with these words he buried his head in the bedclothes.

Mr. Hawes looked at Mr. Fry; Mr. Fry answered the look.

“He must have seen Josephs the other day.

” “Ay!

he is mighty curious.

Well, when he gets well!

” and, shaking his fist at the sufferer, Mr. Hawes went out of the cell soon after.

CHAPTER XI.

“WHAT is your report about No. 19, doctor?

” “The fever is gone.

”