Chapter XVIII (2)

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.

“There, I told you so,” said Josephs pettishly, “now you have been and turned it out.”

“Yes, I have been and turned it out,” replied Fry with a brutal laugh, “and it won't be turned on again for fourteen days, so the governor says, however, and I suppose he knows,” and Fry went out chuckling.

Josephs burst out sobbing and almost screaming at this last stroke; it seemed to hurt him more than his fiercer tortures. He sobbed so wildly and so loud that Mr. Jones, passing on the opposite corridor, heard him and beckoned to Evans to open the cell.

They found the boy standing in the middle of his dungeon shaking with cold in his drenched clothes and sobbing with his whole body. It was frightful to see and hear the agony and despair of one so young in years, so old in misery.

Mr. Jones gave him words of commonplace consolation. Mr. Jones tried to persuade him that patience was the best cure.

“Be patient, and do not irritate the governor any more--the storm will pass.”

He seemed to Josephs as one that mocketh. Jones's were such little words to fling in the face of a great despair; to chatter unreasonable consolation was to mock his unutterable misery of soul and body.

Mr. Jones was one of those who sprinkle a burning mountain with a teaspoonful of milk and water, and then go away and make sure they have put it out. When he was gone with this impression, Evans took down the boy's bed and said:

“Don't ye cry now like that; it makes me ill to hear any Christian cry like that.”

“Oh, Mr. Evans! oh! oh! oh! oh! What have I done? Oh, my mother! my mother! my mother!”

Evans winced. What! had he a mother, too? If she could see him now! and perhaps he was her darling though he was a prisoner. He shook the bed-clothes out and took hold of the shivering boy and with kind force made him lie down; then he twisted the clothes tight round him.

“You will get warm, if you will but lie quiet and not think about it.”

Josephs did what he was bid. He could not still his sobs, but he turned his mournful eyes on Evans with a look of wonder at meeting with kindness from a human being, and half doubtingly put out his hand. So then Evans, to comfort him, took his hand and shook it several times in his hard palm, and said:

“Good-night. You'll soon get warm, and don't think of it--that is the best way;” and Evans ran away in the middle of a sentence, for the look of astonishment the boy wore at his humanity went through the man's penitent heart like an arrow.

Josephs lay quiet and his sobs began gradually to go down, and, as Evans had predicted, some little warmth began to steal over his frame; but he could not comply with all Evans's instructions; he could not help thinking of it. For all that, as soon as he got a little warm, Nature, who knew how much her tortured son needed repose, began to weigh down his eyelids, and he dozed. He often started, he often murmured a prayer for pity as his mind acted over again the scenes of his miserable existence; but still he dozed, and sleep was stealing over him. Sleep! life's nurse sent from heaven to create us anew day by day!--sleep! that has blunted and gradually cured a hundred thousand sorrows for one that has yielded to any moral remedy--sleep! that has blunted and so cured by degrees a million fleshly ills for one that drugs or draughts have ever reached--sleep had her arm round this poor child and was drawing him gently, gently, slowly, slowly to her bosom--when suddenly his cell seemed to him to be all in a blaze, and a rough hand shook him, and a harsh voice sounded in his ear.

“Come, get up out of that, youngster,” it said, and the hand almost jerked him off the floor.

“What is the matter?” inquired Josephs yawning.

“Matter is, I want your bed.”

Josephs rose half stupid, and Hodges rolled up his bed and blanket.

“Are you really going to rob me of my bed?” inquired Josephs slowly and firmly.

“Rob you, you young dog? Here is the governor's order. No bed and gas for fourteen days.”

“No bed nor gas for fourteen days! Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!”

“Oh, you laugh at that, do you?”

“I laugh at Mr. Hawes thinking to keep me out of bed for fourteen days, a poor wornout boy like me. You tell Hawes I'll find a bed in spite of him long before fourteen days.”

Hodges looked about the cell for this other bed. “Come,” said he, “you must not chaff the officers. The governor will serve you out enough without your giving us any of your sauce.”

Hodges was going with the bed. Josephs stopped him. The boy took this last blow quite differently from the gas; no impatience or burst of sorrow now.

“Won't you bid me good-by, Mr. Hodges?” asked he.

“Why not? Good-night.”

“That isn't what I mean. Mr. Evans gave me his hand.”

“Did he? what for?”

“And so must you. Oh, you may as well, Mr. Hodges. I never came to you and took away your little bit of light and your little bit of sleep. So you can take my hand if I can give it you. You will be sorry afterward if you say no.”

“There it is--what the better are you for that, you young fool? I'll tell you what it is, you are turning soft. I don't know what to make of you. I shall come to your cell the first thing in the morning.”

“Ay, do, Mr. Hodges,” said Josephs, “and then you won't be sorry you shook hands at night.”

At this moment the boy's supper was thrust through the trap-door; it was not the supper by law appointed, but six ounces of bread and a can of water.

Hodges, now that he had touched the prisoner's hand, felt his first spark of something bordering on sympathy. He looked at the grub half ashamed and made a wry face. Josephs caught his look and answered it.

“It is as much as I shall want,” said he very calmly, and he smiled at Hodges as he spoke, a sweet and tender but dogged smile; a smile to live in a man's memory for years.

The door was closed with a loud snap, and Josephs was left to face the long night (it was now seven o'clock) in his wet clothes, which smoked with the warmth his late bed had begun to cherish; but they soon ceased to smoke as the boy froze.

Night advanced. Josephs walked about his little cell, his teeth chattering, then flung himself like a dead log on the floor, and finding Hawes's spirit in the cold, hard stone, rose and crawled shivering to and fro again.

Meantime we were all in our nice soft beds; such as found three blankets too little added a dressing-gown of flannel, or print lined with wadding or fleecy hosiery, and so made shift. In particular all those who had the care of Josephs took care to lie warm and soft. Hawes, Jones, Hodges, Fry, Justices Shallow and Woodcock, all took the care of their own carcasses they did not take of Josephs' youthful frame.

“Be cold at night? Not if we know it; why you can't sleep if you are not thoroughly warm!!”