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

If you force a strong-willed stick out of its bent, with what fury it flies back ad statum quo or a little farther when the coercion is removed.

So hard-grained Hawes, his fears of the higher powers removed, returned with a spring to his intermitted habits.

There was no incarnate obstacle now to “discipline.

” There was a provisional chaplain, but that chaplain was worthy Mr. Jones, who having visited the town for a month, had consented for a week or two to supply the sick man's place, and did supply it so far as a good clock can replace a man.

Viewing himself now as something between an officer and a guest he was less likely to show fight than ever.

Earnest Hawes pilloried, flung into black dungeons, stole beds and gas-light, crushed souls with mysterious threats, and bodies with a horrible mixture of those tortures that madden and those other tortures that exhaust.

No Spanish Inquisitor was ever a greater adept at this double move than earnest Hawes.

The means by which he could make any prisoner appear refractory have already been described, but in the case of one stout fellow whom he wanted to discipline he now went a step farther.

He slipped into the yard and slyly clogged one of the cranks with a weight which he inserted inside the box and attached to the machinery.

This contrivance would have beaten Hercules and made him seem idle to any one not in the secret.

In short this little blockhead bade fair to become one of Mr. Carlyle's great men.

He combined the earnest sneak with the earnest butcher.

Barbarous times are not wholly expunged as book-makers affect to fear.

Legislators, moralists and writers (I don't include book-makers under that title) try to clap their extinguishers on them with God's help;

but they still contrive to shoot some lurid specimens of themselves into civilized epochs.

Such a black ray of the narrow, self-deceiving, stupid, bloody past was earnest Hawes.

Not a tithe of his exploits can be recorded here, for though he played upon many souls and bodies, he repeated the same notes--hunger, thirst, the blackness of darkness, crucifixion, solitude, loss of sleep--so that a description of all his feats would be a catalogue of names subjected to the above tortures, and be dry as well as revolting.

I shall describe therefore only the grand result of all, and a case or two that varied by a shade the monotony of discipline.

He kept one poor lad without any food at all from Saturday morning till Sunday at twelve o'clock, and made him work; and for his Sunday dinner gave the famished wretch six ounces of bread and a can of water.

He strapped one prisoner up in the pillory for twenty-four hours, and directed him to be fed in it.

This prisoner had a short neck, and the cruel collar would not let him eat, so that the tortures of Tantalus were added to crucifixion.

The earnest beast put a child of eleven years old into a strait-waistcoat for three days, then kept him three days on bread and water, and robbed him of his bed and his gas for fourteen days.

We none of us know the meaning of these little punishments so vast beyond our experience; but in order to catch a glimmer of the meaning of the last item, we must remember first that the cells admit but little light, and that the gas is the prisoner's sunlight for the hour or two of rest from hard toil that he is allowed before he is ordered to bed, and next that a prisoner has but two sets of clothes--those he stands upright in, and his bed-clothes; these are rolled up inside the bed every morning.

When therefore a prisoner was robbed of his bed, he was robbed of the means of keeping himself warm as well as of that rest without which life soon comes to a full stop.

Having victimized this child's tender body as aforesaid Mr. Hawes made a cut at his soul.

He stopped his chapel.

One ought not to laugh at a worm coming between another worm and his God and saying, “No!

you shall not hear of God to-day--you have displeased a functionary whose discipline takes precedence of His;” and it is to be observed, that though this blockhead did not in one sense comprehend the nature of his own impious act any more than a Hottentot would, yet as broad as he saw he saw keenly.

The one ideaed-man wanted to punish, and deprivation of chapel is a bitter punishment to a prisoner under the separate and silent system.

And lay this down as a rule, whenever in this tale a punishment is recorded as having been inflicted by Hawes, however light it may appear to you who never felt it, bring your intelligence to bear on it--weigh the other conditions of a prisoner's miserable existence it was added to, and in every case you will find it was a blow with a sledge-hammer;

in short, to comprehend Hawes and his fraternity it is necessary to make a mental effort and comprehend the meaning of the word “accumulation.

” The first execution of biped Carter took place about a week after Mr. Eden was laid prostrate.

It is not generally very difficult to outwit an imbecile, and the governor enmeshed Carter, made him out refractory and crucified him.

The poor soul did not hallo at first, for he remembered they had not cut his throat the last time, as he thought they were going to do (he had seen a pig first made fast--then stuck).

But when the bitter cramps came on he began to howl and cry most frightfully; so that Hawes, who was talking to the surgeon in the center of the building, started and came at once to the place.

Mr. Sawyer came with him.

They tried different ways of quieting him, in vain.

They went to a distance, as Mr. Eden had suggested, but it was no use; he was howling now from pain, not fear.

“Gag him!

” roared Hawes, “it is scandalous; I hate a noise.

” “Better loose him,” suggested the surgeon.

Hawes blighted him with a look.

“What; and let him beat me?

” “There is no gag in the prison,” said Fry.

“A pretty prison without a gag in it!

” said Hawes; the only reflection he was ever heard to cast on his model jail; then, with sudden ferocity he turned on Sawyer.

“What is the use of you; don't you know anything for your money?

can't all your science stop this brute's windpipe, you!

” Science thus blandly invoked came to the aid of inhumanity.

“Humph!

have you got any salt?

” “Salt!

” roared Hawes, “what is the use of salt?

Oh!

ay, I see!

run and get a pound, and look sharp with it.

” They brought the salt.

“Now, will you hold your noise?

--then, give it him.

” The scientific operator watched his opportunity, and when the poor biped's mouth was open howling, crammed a handful of salt into it.

He spat it out as well as he could, but some of it dissolved by the saliva found its way down his throat.

The look of amazement and distress that followed was most amusing to the operators.

“That was, a good idea, doctor,” cried Hawes.

The triumph was premature.

Carter's cries were choked for a moment by his astonishment.

But the next, finding a fresh torture added to the first, he howled louder than ever.

Then the governor seized the salt, powdered a good handful, and avoiding his teeth crammed it suddenly into the poor creature's mouth.

He spat it furiously out, and the brine fell like sea-spray upon all the operators, especially on Hawes, who swore at the biped, and called him a beast, and promised him a long spell of the cross for his nastiness.

After Hawes, Fry must take his turn; and so now these three creatures, to whom Heaven had given reason, combined their strength and their sacred reason to torture and degrade one of those whom the French call “betes du bon Dieu”--a heaven-afflicted--heaven-pitied brother.

They respected neither the hapless wight nor his owner.

Whenever he opened his mouth with the instinct that makes animals proclaim their hurts and appeal for pity on the chance of a heart being within hearing, then did these show their sense of his appeal thus: One of the party crammed the stinging salt down his throat; the others watched him, and kept clear of the brine that he spat vehemently out, and a loud report of laughter followed instantly each wild grimace and convulsion of fear and torture.

Thus they employed their reason, and flouted as well as tortured him who had less.

“Haw!

haw!

haw!

haw!

haw!

” No lightning came down from heaven upon these merry souls.

The idiot's spittle did not burn them when it fell on them.

ALL THE WORSE FOR THEM!

They left Carter for hours in the pillory, and soon a violent thirst was added to his sufferings.

Prolonged pain brings on cruel thirst, and many a poor fellow suffered horribly from it during the last hours of his pillory.

But in this case the salt he had swallowed made it more vehement.

Most men go through life and never know thirst.

It is a frightful torture, as any novice would have learned who had seen Carter at six in the evening of this cruel day.

The poor wretch's throat was so parched he could hardly breathe.

His eyes were all bloodshot and his livid tongue lolled stringless and powerless out of his gasping mouth.

He would have given diamonds for drops of water.

The earnest man going his rounds of duty saw his pitiable state and forbade relief till the number of hours he had appointed for his punishment should be completed.

Discipline before all!

There was one man in the jail, just one, who could no longer view this barbarity unmoved.

His heart had been touched and his understanding wakened, and he saw these prodigies of cruelty in their true light.

But he was afraid of Hawes, and unfortunately the others by an instinct felt their comrade was no longer one of them and watched him closely.

But his intelligence was awakened with his humanity.

After much thought he hit upon this; he took the works out of his watch--an old hunting watch--and stolling into the yard, dipped the case into the bucket, then closed it; and soon after getting close to Carter, and between him and Fry, he affected to examine the prisoner's collar, and then hastily gave him a watchful of cold water.

Carter sucked it with frightful avidity, and small as the draught was no mortal can say what consequences were averted by it.

Evans was dreadfully out of spirits.

His ally lay dying and his enemy triumphed.

He looked to be turned out of the jail at the next meeting of magistrates.

But when he had given the idiot his watch to drink out of an unwonted warmth and courage seemed to come into his heart.

This touch of humanity coming suddenly among the most hellish of all fiends--men of system--was like the little candle in a window that throws its beams so far when we are bewildered in a murky night.

For the place was now a moral coal-hole.

The dungeons at Rome that lie under the wing of Roderick Borgia's successors are not a more awful remnant of antiquity or a fouler blot on the age, on the law, on the land, and on human nature.

A thick, dark pall of silence and woe hung over its huge walls.

If a voice was heard above a whisper it was sure to be either a cry of anguish or a fierce command to inflict anguish.

Two or three were crucified every day; the rest expected crucifixion from morning till night.

No man felt safe an hour; no man had the means of averting punishment; all were at the mercy of a tyrant.

Threats frightful, fierce and mysterious hung like weights over every soul and body.

Whenever a prisoner met an officer he cowered and hurried crouching by like a dog passing a man with a whip in his hand; and as he passed he trembled at the thunder of his own footsteps, and wished to Heaven they would not draw so much attention to him by ringing so clear through that huge silent tomb.

When an officer met the governor he tried to slip by with a hurried salute lest he should be stopped, abused and sworn at.

The earnest man fell hardest upon the young; boys and children were favorite victims; but his favorites of all were poor Robinson and little Josephs.

These were at the head of the long list he crucified, he parched, he famished, he robbed of prayer, of light, of rest and hope.

He disciplined the sick; he closed the infirmary again.

That large room, furnished with comforts, nurses and air, was an inconsistency.

“A new prison is a collection of cells,” said Hawes.

The infirmary was a spot in the sun.

The exercise yard in this prison was a twelve-box stable for creatures concluded to be wild beasts.

The labor-yard was a fifteen-stall stable for ditto.

The house of God an eighty-stalled stable, into which the wild beasts were dispersed for public worship made private.

Here, in early days, before Hawes was ripe, they assembled apart and repeated prayers, and sang hymns on Sunday.

But Hawes found out that though the men were stabled apart their voices were refractory and mingled in the air, and with their voices their hearts might, who knows?

He pointed this out to the justices, who shook their skulls and stopped the men's responses and hymns.

These animals cut the choruses out of the English liturgy with as little ceremony and as good effect as they would have cut the choruses out of Handel's “Messiah,” if the theory they were working had been a musical instead of a moral one.

So far so good; but the infirmary had escaped Justice Shallow and Justice Woodcock.

Hawes abolished that.

Discipline before all.

Not because a fellow is sick is he to break discipline.

So the sick lay in their narrow cells gasping in vain for fresh air, gasping in vain for some cooling drink, or some little simple delicacy to incite their enfeebled appetite.

The dying were locked up at the fixed hour for locking up, and found dead at the fixed hour for opening.

How they had died--no one knew.

At what hour they had died--no one knew.

Whether in some choking struggle a human hand might have saved them by changing a suffocating position or the like--no one knew.

But this all knew--that these our sinful brethren had died, not like men, but like vultures in the great desert.

They were separated from their kith and kin, who however brutal would have said a kind word and done a tender thing or two for them at that awful hour; and nothing allowed them in exchange, not even the routine attentions of a prison nurse; they were in darkness and alone when the king of terrors came to them and wrestled with them.

All men had turned their backs on them, no creature near to wipe the dews of death, to put a cool hand to the brow, or soften the intensity of the last sad sigh that carried their souls from earth.

Thus they passed away, punished lawlessly by the law till they succumbed, and then, since they were no longer food for torture, ignored by the law and abandoned by the human race.

They locked up one dying man at eight o'clock.

At midnight the thirst of death came on him.

He prayed for a drop of water, but there was none to hear him.

Parched and gasping the miserable man got out of bed and groped for his tin mug, but before he could drink the death agony seized him.

When they unlocked him in the morning they found him a corpse on the floor with the mug in his hand and the water spilled on the floor.

They wrenched the prison property out of its dead hand, and flung the carcass itself upon the bed as if it had been the clay cast of a dog, not the remains of a man.

All was of a piece.

The living tortured; the dying abandoned; the dead kicked out of the way.

Of these three the living were the most unfortunate, and among the living Robinson and Josephs.

Never since the days of Cain was existence made more bitter to two hapless creatures than to these--above all to Josephs.

His day began thus: Between breakfast and dinner he was set five thousand revolutions of a heavy crank; when he could not do it his dinner was taken away and a few crumbs of bread and a can of water given him instead.

Between his bread and water time and six o'clock if the famished, worn-out lad could not do five thousand more revolutions and make up the previous deficiency he was punished ad libitum.

As the whole thing from first to last was beyond his powers, he never succeeded in performing these preposterous tasks.

He was threatened, vilified and tortured every day and every hour of it.

Human beings can bear great sufferings if you give them periods of ease between; and beneficent nature allows for this, and when she means us to suffer short of death she lashes us at intervals; were it otherwise we should succumb under a tithe of what we suffer intermittently.

But Hawes, besides his cruelty, was a noodle.

He belonged to a knot of theorists into whose hands the English jails are fast falling; a set of shallow dreamers, who being greater dunces and greater asses than four men out of every six that pass you in Fleet Street or Broadway at any hour, think themselves wiser than Nature and her Author.

Josephs suffered body and spirit without intermission.

The result was that his flesh withered on his bones; his eyes were dim and seemed to lie at the bottom of two caverns; he crawled stiffly and slowly instead of walking.

He was not sixteen years of age, yet Hawes had extinguished his youth and blotted out all its signs but one.

Had you met this figure in the street you would have said: “What, an old man and no beard?

” One day as Robinson happened to be washing the corridor with his beaver up, what he took for a small but aged man passed him, shambling stiffly, with joints stiffened by perpetual crucifixion and rheumatism, that had ensued from perpetually being wetted through.

This figure had his beaver down.

At sight of Robinson he started and instantly went down on his knee and untied both shoe strings; then while tying them again slowly he whispered: “Robinson, I am Josephs; don't look toward me.

” Robinson, scrubbing the wall with more vigor than before, whispered, “How are they using you now, boy?

” “Hush!

don't speak so loud.

Robinson--they are killing me.

“The ruffians!

They are trying all they know to kill me, too.

” “Fry coming.

” “Hist!

” said Robinson as Josephs crept away; and having scraped off a grain of whitewash with his nail he made a little white mark on his trouser just above his calf, for Josephs to know him by, should they meet next time with visors both down.

Josephs gave a slight and rapid signal of intelligence as he disappeared.

Two days after this they met on the staircase.

The boy, who now looked at every prisoner's trowsers for the white mark, recognized Robinson at some distance and began to speak before they met.

“I can't go on much longer like this.

” “No more can I. ” “I shall go to father.

” “Why where is he?

” “He is dead.

” “I don't care how soon I go there either, but not till I have sent Hawes on before--not for all the world.

Pass me, and then come back.

” They met again.

“Keep up your heart, boy, till his reverence gets well, or goes to heaven.

If he lives he will save us somehow.

If he dies--I'll tell you a secret.

I know where there is a brick I think I can loosen.

I mean to smash that beast's skull with it, and then you will be all right, and my heart will feel like a prince.

” “Oh!

don't do that,” said Josephs piteously.

“Better far us he should murder us than we him.

” “Murder!

” cried Robinson contemptuously.

And there was no time to say any more.

After this many days passed before these two could get a syllable together.

But one day after chapel as the men were being told off to their several tasks Robinson recognized the boy by his figure, and jogging his elbow withdrew a little apart; Josephs followed him, and this time Robinson was the first speaker.

“We shall never see Mr. Eden alive again, boy,” said he in a faltering voice.

Then in a low gloomy tone he muttered, “I have loosened the brick.

The day I lose all hope that day I send Hawes home.

” And the thief pointed toward the cellar.

“The day you have no more hope, Robinson; that day has come to me this fortnight and more.

He tells me every day he will make my life hell to me, and I am sure it has been nothing else ever since I came here.

” “Keep up your heart, boy; he hasn't long to live.

” “He will live too long for me.

I can't stay here any longer.

You and I shan't often chat together again; perhaps never.

” “Don't talk so, laddie.

Keep up your heart--for my sake.

” One bitter tearing sob was all the reply.

And so these two parted.

This was just after breakfast.

At dinner-time Josephs, not having performed an impossible task, was robbed of his dinner.

A little bread and water was served out to him in the yard, and he was set on the crank again with fearful menaces.

In particular Mr. Hawes repeated his favorite threat--“I'll make your life hell to you.

” Josephs groaned; but what could a boy of fifteen do, overtasked and famished for a month past and fitter now for a hospital than for hard labor of any sort?

At three o'clock his progress on the crank was so slow that Mr. Hawes ordered him to be crucified on the spot.

His obedient myrmidons for the fiftieth time seized the lad and crushed him in the jacket, throttled him in the collar, and pinned him to the wall, and this time, the first time for a long while, the prisoner remonstrated loudly.

“Why not kill me at once and put me out of my misery!

” “Hold your tongue.

” “You know I can't do the task you set me.

You know it as well as I do.

” “Hold your tongue, you insolent young villain.

Strap him tighter, Fry.

” “Oh no!

no!

no!

don't go to strap me tighter or you will cut me in half--don't, Mr. Fry.

I will hold my tongue, sir.

” Then he turned his hollow, mournful eyes on Hawes and said gently, “It can't last much longer, you know.

” “It shall last till I break you, you obstinate, whining dog.

You are hardly used, are you?

Wait till to-morrow.

I'll show you that I have only been playing with you as yet.

But I have got a punishment in store for you that will make you wish you were in hell.

” Hawes stood over the martyr fiercely threatening him.

The martyr shut his eyes.

It seemed as though the enraged Hawes would end by striking him.

He winced with his eyes.

He could not wince with any other part of his body, so tight was it jammed together and jammed against the wall.

Hawes however did but repeat his threat of some new torture on the morrow that should far eclipse all he had yet endured; and shaking his fist at his helpless body left him with his torture.

One hour of bitter, racking, unremitting anguish had hardly rolled over this young head ere his frame, weakened by famine and perpetual violence, began to give the usual signs that he would soon sham--swoon we call it when it occurs to any but a prisoner.

As my readers have never been in Mr. Hawes's man-press, and as attempts have been made to impose on the inexperience of the public and represent the man-press as restriction not torture, I will shortly explain why sooner or later all the men that were crucified in it ended by shamming.

Were you ever seized at night with a violent cramp?

Then you have instantly with a sort of wild and alarmed rapidity changed the posture which had cramped you; ay though the night was ever so cold you have sprung out of bed sooner than lie cramped.

If the cramp would not go in less than half a minute that half-minute was long and bitter.

As for existing cramped half an hour, that you never thought possible.

Imagine now the severest cramp you ever felt artificially prolonged for hours and hours.

Imagine yourself cramped in a vise, no part of you movable a hair's breadth, except your hair and your eyelids.

Imagine the fierce cramp growing and growing, and rising like a tide of agony higher and higher above nature's endurance, and you will cease to wonder that a man always sunk under Hawes's man-press.

Now, then, add to the cramp a high circular saw raking the throat, jacket straps cutting and burning the flesh of the back--add to this the freezing of the blood in the body deprived so long of all motion whatever (for motion of some sort or degree is a condition of vitality), and a new and far more rational wonder arises, that any man could be half an hour cut, sawed, crushed, cramped, Mazeppa'd thus, without shamming--still less be four, six, eight hours in it, and come out a living man.

The young martyr's lips were turning blue, his face was twitching convulsively, when a word was unexpectedly put in for him by a bystander.

The turnkey Evans had been half sullenly half sorrowfully watching him for some minutes past.

A month or two ago the lips of a prisoner turning blue and his skin twitching told Evans nothing.

He saw these things without seeing them.

He was cruel from stupidity--from blockhead to butcher there is but a step.

Like the English public he _realized_ nothing where prisoners were concerned.

But Mr. Eden had awakened his intelligence, and his heart waked with it naturally.

Now when he saw lips turning blue and eyes rolling in sad despair, and skin twitching convulsively, it occurred to him--“this creature must be suffering very badly,” and the next step was “let me see what is hurting him so.

” Evans now stood over Josephs and examined him.

“Mr. Fry,” said he doggedly, “is not this overdoing it?

” “What d'ye mean, we are to obey orders, I suppose?

” “Of course, but there was no need to draw the jacket straps so tight as all this.

Boy's bellows can't hardly work for 'em.

” He now passed his hand round the hollow of the lad's back.

“I thought so,” cried he; “I can't get my finger between the straps and the poor fellow's flesh, and, good heavens I can feel the skin rising like a ridge on each side of the straps; it is a black, burning shame to use any Christian like this.

” These words were hardly out of the turnkey's mouth when a startling cry came suddenly from poor Josephs; a sudden, wild, piercing scream of misery.

In that bitter, despairing cry burst out the pent-up anguish of weeks, and the sense of injustice and cruelty more than human.

The poor thing gave this one terrible cry.

Heaven forbid that you should hear such a one in life, as I hear his in my heart, and then he fell to sobbing as if his whole frame would burst.

They were not much, these rough words of sympathy, but they were the first--the first words, too, of humanity and reason a turnkey had spoken in his favor since he came into this hell.

Above all, the first in which it had ever been hinted or implied that his flesh was human flesh.

The next moment he began to cry, but that was not so easy.

He soon lost his breath and couldn't cry though his very life depended on it.

Tears gave relief.

Dame Nature said, “Cry, my suffering son, cry now, and relieve that heart swelling with cruelty and wrong.

” But Hawes's infernal machine said, “No, you shall not cry.

I give you no room to cry in.

” The cruel straps jammed him so close his swelling heart could but half heave.

The jagged collar bit his throat so hard he could but give three or four sobs and then the next choked him.

The struggle between Nature panting and writhing for relief, and the infernal man-press, was so bitter strong that the boy choked and blackened and gasped as one in the last agony.

“Undo him,” cried Evans hastily, “or we shall kill him among us.

” “Bucket,” said the experienced Fry quite coolly.

The bucket was at hand--its contents were instantly discharged over Josephs' head.

A cry like a dying hare--two or three violent gasps--and he was quiet, all but a strong shiver that passed from head to foot; only with the water that now trickled from his hair down his face scalding tears from his young eyes fell to the ground undistinguished from the water by any eye but God's. At six o'clock Hawes came into the yard and ordered Fry to take him down.

Fry took this opportunity of informing against Evans for his mild interference.

“He will pay for that along with the rest,” said Hawes with an oath.

Then he turned on Josephs, who halted stiffly by him on his way to his cell.

“I'll make your life hell to you, you young vagabond--you are hardly used, are you?

all you have ever known isn't a stroke with a feather to what I'll make you know by-and-by.

Wait till to-morrow comes, you shall see what I can do when I am put to it.

” Josephs sobbed, but answered nothing, and crawled sore, stiff, dripping, shivering to his cell.

In that miserable hole he would at least be at peace.

He found the gas lighted.

He was glad, for he was drenched through and bitterly cold.

He crept up to the little gaslight and put his dead white hands over it and got a little warmth into them; he blessed this spark of light and warmth; he looked lovingly down on it, it was his only friend in the jail, his companion in the desolate cell.

He wished he could gather it into his bosom; then it would warm his heart and his blighted flesh and aching, shivering bones.

While he hung shivering over his spark of light and warmth and comfort, a key was put into his door.

“Ah!

here's supper,” thought he, “and I am so hungry.

” It was not supper, it was Fry who came in empty-handed, leaving the door open.

Fry went to his gaslight and put his finger and thumb on the screw.

“Oh!

it burns all right, Mr. Fry,” said Josephs, “it won't go any higher, thank you.

” “No, it won't,” said Fry dryly, and turned it out, leaving the cell in utter darkness.