Chapter X: Book VI: Martyrdom (2)

The numbness of death steals upon my soul. The floor is cold and clammy, the gnawing grows louder and nearer, and I am filled with dread lest the starving rats attack my bare feet. I snatch a few unconscious moments leaning against the door; and then again I pace the cell, striving to keep awake, wondering whether it be night or day, yearning for the sound of a human voice.

Utterly forsaken! Cast into the stony bowels of the underground, the world of man receding, leaving no trace behind.... Eagerly I strain my ear--only the ceaseless, fearful gnawing. I clutch the bars in desperation--a hollow echo mocks the clanking iron. My hands tear violently at the door--"Ho, there! Any one here?" All is silent. Nameless terrors quiver in my mind, weaving nightmares of mortal dread and despair. Fear shapes convulsive thoughts: they rage in wild tempest, then become calm, and again rush through time and space in a rapid succession of strangely familiar scenes, wakened in my slumbering consciousness.

Exhausted and weary I droop against the wall. A slimy creeping on my face startles me in horror, and again I pace the cell. I feel cold and hungry. Am I forgotten? Three days must have passed, and more. Have they forgotten me?...

The clank of keys sends a thrill of joy to my heart. My tomb will open--oh, to see the light, and breathe the air again....

"Officer, isn't my time up yet?"

"What's your hurry? You've only been here one day."

The doors fall to. Ravenously I devour the bread, so small and thin, just a bite. Only _one_ day! Despair enfolds me like a pall. Faint with anguish, I sink to the floor....

_The Sick Line_

One by one the men augment the row; they walk slowly, bent and coughing, painfully limping down the steep flights. From every range they come; the old and decrepit, the young consumptives, the lame and asthmatic, a tottering old negro, an idiotic white boy. All look withered and dejected,--a ghastly line, palsied and blear-eyed, blanched in the valley of death.

The rotunda door opens noisily, and the doctor enters, accompanied by Deputy Warden Graves and Assistant Deputy Hopkins. Behind them is a prisoner, dressed in dark gray and carrying a medicine box. Dr. Boyce glances at the long line, and knits his brows. He looks at his watch, and the frown deepens. He has much to do. Since the death of the senior doctor, the young graduate is the sole physician of the big prison. He must make the rounds of the shops before noon, and visit the hospital before the Warden or the Deputy drops in.

Mr. Greaves sits down at the officers' desk, near the hall entrance. The Assistant Deputy, pad in hand, places himself at the head of the sick line. The doctor leans against the door of the rotunda, facing the Deputy. The block officers stand within call, at respectful distances.

"Two-fifty-five!" the Assistant Deputy calls out.

A slender young man leaves the line and approaches the doctor. He is tall and well featured, the large eyes lustrous in the pale face. He speaks in a hoarse voice:

"Doctor, there is something the matter with my side. I have pains, and I cough bad at night, and in the morning----"

"All right," the doctor interrupts, without looking up from his note book. "Give him some salts," he adds, with a nod to his assistant.

"Next!" the Deputy calls.

"Will you please excuse me from the shop for a few days?" the sick prisoner pleads, a tremor in his voice.

The physician glances questioningly at the Deputy. The latter cries, impatiently, "Next, next man!" striking the desk twice, in quick succession, with the knuckles of his hand.

"Return to the shop," the doctor says to the prisoner.

"Next," the Deputy calls, spurting a stream of tobacco juice in the direction of the cuspidor. It strikes sidewise, and splashes over the foot of the approaching new patient, a young negro, his neck covered with bulging tumors.

"Number?" the doctor inquires.

"One-thirty-seven, A one-thirty-seven!" the Deputy mumbles, his head thrown back to receive a fresh handful of "scrap" tobacco.

"Guess Ah's got de big neck, Ah is, Mistah Boyce," the negro says hoarsely.

"Salts. Return to work. Next!"

"A one-twenty-six!"

A young man with parchment-like face, sere and yellow, walks painfully from the line.

"Doctor, I seem to be gettin' worser, and I'm afraid----"

"What's the trouble?"

"Pains in the stomach. Gettin' so turrible, I----"

"Give him a plaster. Next!"

"Plaster hell!" the prisoner breaks out in a fury, his face growing livid. "Look at this, will you?" With a quick motion he pulls his shirt up to his head. His chest and back are entirely covered with porous plasters; not an inch of skin is visible. "Damn your plasters," he cries with sudden sobs, "I ain't got no more room for plasters. I'm putty near dyin', an' you won't do nothin' fer me."

The guards pounce upon the man, and drag him into the rotunda.

_The Keepers_

The comparative freedom of the range familiarizes me with the workings of the institution, and brings me in close contact with the authorities. The personnel of the guards is of very inferior character. I find their average intelligence considerably lower than that of the inmates. Especially does the element recruited from the police and the detective service lack sympathy with the unfortunates in their charge. They are mostly men discharged from city employment because of habitual drunkenness, or flagrant brutality and corruption. Their attitude toward the prisoners is summed up in coercion and suppression. They look upon the men as will-less objects of iron-handed discipline, exact unquestioning obedience and absolute submissiveness to peremptory whims, and harbor personal animosity toward the less pliant. The more intelligent among the officers scorn inferior duties, and crave advancement. The authority and remuneration of a Deputy Wardenship is alluring to them, and every keeper considers himself the fittest for the vacancy. But the coveted prize is awarded to the guard most feared by the inmates, and most subservient to the Warden,--a direct incitement to brutality on the one hand, to sycophancy on the other....

Daily I behold the machinery at work, grinding and pulverizing, brutalizing the officers, dehumanizing the inmates. Far removed from the strife and struggle of the larger world, I yet witness its miniature replica, more agonizing and merciless within the walls. A perfected model it is, this prison life, with its apparent uniformity and dull passivity. But beneath the torpid surface smolder the fires of being, now crackling faintly under a dun smothering smoke, now blazing forth with the ruthlessness of despair. Hidden by the veil of discipline rages the struggle of fiercely contending wills, and intricate meshes are woven in the quagmire of darkness and suppression.

Intrigue and counter-plot, violence and corruption, are rampant in cell-house and shop. The prisoners spy upon each other, and in turn upon the officers. The latter encourage the trusties in unearthing the secret doings of the inmates, and the stools enviously compete with each other in supplying information to the keepers. Often they deliberately inveigle the trustful prisoner into a fake plot to escape, help and encourage him in the preparations, and at the critical moment denounce him to the authorities. The luckless man is severely punished, usually remaining in utter ignorance of the intrigue. The _provocateur_ is rewarded with greater liberty and special privileges. Frequently his treachery proves the stepping-stone to freedom, aided by the Warden's official recommendation of the "model prisoner" to the State Board of Pardons.

BY FREDERIC HARRISON

(English philosopher, born 1831)

Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives the preaching of a new gospel.

The Seven That Were Hanged

BY LEONID ANDREYEV

(One of the most famous of the Russian writer's stories, in which he describes the execution of a group of Terrorists, analyzing their sensations in their separate cells, and on their journey together to the foot of the gallows)

The Unknown, surnamed Werner, was a man fatigued by struggle. He had loved life, the theatre, society, art, literature, passionately. Endowed with an excellent memory, he spoke several languages perfectly. He was fond of dress, and had excellent manners. Of the whole group of terrorists he was the only one who was able to appear in society without risk of recognition.

For a long time already, and without his comrades having noticed it, he had entertained a profound contempt for men. More of a mathematician than a poet, ecstasy and inspiration had remained so far things unknown to him; at times he would look upon himself as a madman seeking to square the circle in seas of human blood. The enemy against which he daily struggled could not inspire him with respect; it was nothing but a compact network of stupidities, treasons, falsehoods, base deceits....

Werner understood that the execution was not simply death, but also something more. In any case, he was determined to meet it calmly, to live until the end as if nothing had happened or would happen. Only in this way could he repress the profoundest contempt for the execution and preserve his liberty of mind. His comrades, although knowing well his cold and haughty intrepidity, would perhaps not have believed it themselves; but in the courtroom he thought not of life or of death: he played in his mind a difficult game of chess, giving it his deepest and quietest attention. An excellent player, he had begun this game on the very day of his imprisonment, and he had kept it up continually. And the verdict that condemned him did not displace a single piece on the invisible board.

Now he was shrugging his shoulders and feeling his pulse. His heart beat fast, but tranquilly and regularly, with a sonorous force. Like a novice thrown into prison for the first time, he examined attentively the cell, the bolts, the chair screwed to the wall, and said to himself:

"Why have I such a sensation of joy, of liberty? Yes, of liberty; I think of to-morrow's execution, and it seems to me it does not exist. I look at the walls, and they seem to me not to exist either. And I feel as free as if, instead of being in prison, I had just come out of another cell in which I had been confined all my life."

Werner's hands began to tremble, a thing unknown to him. His thought became more and more vibrant. It seemed to him that tongues of fire were moving in his head, trying to escape from his brain to lighten the still obscure distance. Finally the flame darted forth, and the horizon was brilliantly illuminated.

The vague lassitude that had tortured Werner during the last two years had disappeared at sight of death; his beautiful youth came back. It was even something more than beautiful youth. With the astonishing clearness of mind that sometimes lifts man to the supreme heights of meditation, Werner saw suddenly both life and death; and the majesty of this new spectacle struck him. He seemed to be following a path as narrow as the edge of a blade, on the crest of the loftiest mountain. On one side he saw life, and on the other he saw death; and they were like two seas, sparkling and beautiful, melting into each other at the horizon in a single infinite extension.

"What is this, then? What a divine spectacle!" said he slowly.

He arose involuntarily and straightened up, as if in presence of the Supreme Being. And, annihilating the walls, annihilating space and time, by the force of his all-penetrating look, he cast his eyes into the depths of the life that he had quitted.

And life took on a new aspect. He no longer tried, as of old, to translate into words that he was; moreover, in the whole range of human language, still so poor and miserly, he found no words adequate. The paltry, dirty and evil things that suggested to him contempt and sometimes even disgust at the sight of men had completely disappeared, just as, to people rising in a balloon, the mud and filth of the narrow streets become invisible, and ugliness changes into beauty.

With an unconscious movement Werner walked toward the table and leaned upon it with his right arm. Haughty and authoritative by nature, he had never been seen in a prouder, freer, and more imperious attitude; never had his face worn such a look, never had he so lifted up his head, for at no previous time had he been as free and powerful as now, in this prison, on the eve of execution, at the threshold of death.

In his illuminated eyes men wore a new aspect, an unknown beauty and charm. He hovered above time, and never had this humanity, which only the night before was howling like a wild beast in the forest, appeared to him so young. What had heretofore seemed to him terrible, unpardonable and base, became suddenly touching and naïve, just as we cherish in the child the awkwardness of its behavior, the incoherent stammerings in which its unconscious genius glimmers, its laughable errors and blunders, its cruel bruises.

"My dear friends!" ...

What mysterious path had he followed to pass from a feeling of unlimited and haughty liberty to this passionate and moving pity? He did not know. Did he really pity his comrades, or did his tears hide something more passionate, something really greater? His heart, which had suddenly revived and reblossomed, could not tell him. Werner wept, and whispered:

"My dear comrades! My dear comrades!"

And in this man who wept, and who smiled through his tears, no one--not the judges, or his comrades, or himself--would have recognized the cold and haughty Werner, sceptical and insolent.

A Woman's Execution

BY EDWARD KING

(After the Paris Commune of 1871, the leaders of the people were led out and slaughtered by thousands. The author of this poem was an American journalist, 1848-1896)

Sweet-breathed and young,
The people's daughter,
No nerves unstrung,
Going to slaughter!

"Good morning, friends,
You'll love us better,--
Make us amends:
We've burst your fetter!

"How the sun gleams!
(Women are snarling):
Give me your beams,
Liberty's darling!

"Marie's my name;
Christ's mother bore it.
The badge? No shame:
Glad that I wore it!"

(Hair to the waist,
Limbs like a Venus):
Robes are displaced:
"Soldiers, please screen us!

"He at the front?
That is my lover:
Stood all the brunt;--
Now--the fight's over.

"Powder and bread
Gave out together:
Droll to be dead
In this bright weather!

"Jean, boy, we might
Have married in June!
This is the wall? Right!
_Vive la Commune!_"

BY THOMAS JEFFERSON

(See page 228)

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

These Shifting Scenes

BY CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL

(American editor and Socialist lecturer, born 1860. In the following paragraphs he has given a newspaper reporter's reminiscences of the Chicago Anarchists)

After so many years the passions and prejudices of the half-forgotten struggle ought to have died away, and men may now speak candidly and without restraint of these things as they really were. Let me then record my deliberate conviction that Albert Parsons never entertained the thought of harm against any human being, for I have seldom met a man of a more genuine kindness of heart; and if the men he denounced in his speeches had been in actual danger before him I am certain he would have been the first to rush to their defense from physical harm. And while I am on this subject, I may add an expression of a wonder growing upon me for many years, that no one has ever paid an adequate tribute to this man. I have not the slightest sympathy with his doctrines, if he believed in the violence he seemed sometimes to preach, which I could never tell. I have lived in the world long enough to know that the social wrongs that moved him to protest can never be cured by violence. Say, then, that the man erred grievously; if his error had been ten times as great it ought to have been wiped from human recollection by his sacrifice, and there should remain but the one image of him, leaving his place of safety and voluntarily entering the prisoner's dock. I doubt if that magnanimous act has its parallel in history. A hundred men have been elevated to be national heroes for deeds far less heroic. The fact that after all these years it is still obscured and men hesitate to speak about it is marvelous testimony to the power of the press to produce enduring impressions. Even the other staggering fact that in the history of American courts this is the only man that ever came voluntarily and gave himself up and then was hanged, even that seems to be eliminated from the little consideration that is ever bestowed upon a figure of courage so extraordinary.

Similarly I wondered while all these events were passing before me and wonder now, that no one ever stopped to inquire why such men as Parsons and Fielden were in revolt. Granted freely that their idea of the best manner of making a protest was utterly wrong and impossible; granted that they went not the best way to work. But what was it that drove them into attack against the social order as they found it? They and thousands of other men that stood with them were not bad men, nor depraved, nor bloodthirsty, nor hard-hearted, nor criminal, nor selfish, nor crazy. Then what was it that evoked a complaint so bitter and deep-seated? In all the clamor that filled the press for the execution of the law and the supremacy of order not one writer ever stopped to ask this obvious question. No one ever contemplated the simple fact that men do not band themselves together to make a protest without the belief that they have something to protest about, and that in any organized state of society a widespread protest is something for grave inquiry. I thought then and I think now that a few words devoted to this suggestion would have been of far greater service to society than the insensate demand for blood and more blood with which the journals of Chicago were mostly filled.

The Eagle that is Forgotten

BY VACHEL LINDSAY

(Poet and minstrel of Springfield, Illinois, born 1879; has tramped over many parts of the United States with his leaflet of "Rhymes to be Traded for Bread." He has rediscovered the Homeric chant, and poured into it the life of the Middle West. The following poem is addressed to John P. Altgeld, once Governor of Illinois, who, having convinced himself that the so-called Chicago Anarchists were innocent of the crime charged against them, pardoned them, and thereby sacrificed his political career)

Sleep softly ... eagle forgotten ... under the stone.
Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.
"We have buried him now," thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced.
They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced.
They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you, day after day,
Now you were ended. They praised you ... and laid you away.
The others, that mourned you in silence and terror and truth,
The widow bereft of her crust, and the boy without youth,
The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame and the poor,
That should have remembered forever ... remember no more.
Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they call,
The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall?
They call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones,
A hundred white eagles have risen, the sons of your sons.
The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began,
The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man.
Sleep softly ... eagle forgotten ... under the stone.
Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.
Sleep on, O brave-hearted, O wise man that kindled the flame--
To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name,
To live in mankind, far, far more ... than to live in a name.

Immortality

(_From the Will of Francisco Ferrer_)

(Spanish educator and radical, 1859-1909, executed after the Barcelona riots by a plot of his clerical enemies)

I also wish my friends to speak little or not at all about me, because idols are created when men are praised, and this is very bad for the future of the human race. Acts alone, no matter by whom committed, ought to be studied, praised, or blamed. Let them be praised in order that they may be imitated when they seem to contribute to the common weal; let them be censured when they are regarded as injurious to the general well-being, so that they may not to be repeated.

I desire that on no occasion, whether near or remote, nor for any reason whatsoever, shall demonstrations of a political or religious character be made before my remains, as I consider the time devoted to the dead would be better employed in improving the condition of the living, most of whom stand in great need of this.

Light Upon Waldheim

BY VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE

(American anarchist writer, 1866-1912. Waldheim is a cemetery in Chicago, where the executed Anarchists were buried. Upon the monument is the figure of a woman holding a dying man upon her knees, with one hand pressing a crown upon his forehead, and with the other drawing a dagger)

Light upon Waldheim! And the earth is gray;
A bitter wind is driving from the north;
The stone is cold, and strange cold whispers say:
"What do ye here with Death? Go forth! Go forth!"

Is this thy word, O Mother, with stern eyes,
Crowning thy dead with stone-caressing touch?
May we not weep o'er him that martyred lies,
Slain in our name, for that he loved us much?

May we not linger till the day is broad?
Nay, none are stirring in this stinging dawn--
None but poor wretches that make no moan to God:
What use are these, O thou with dagger drawn?

"Go forth, go forth! Stand not to weep for these,
Till, weakened with your weeping, like the snow
Ye melt, dissolving in a coward peace!"
Light upon Waldheim! Brother, let us go!

Assassination

BY AUGUSTE VAILLANT

(From the speech before the French Chamber of Deputies, 1894, prior to receiving sentence of death for a political crime)

Ah, gentlemen, if the governing classes could go down among the unfortunates! But no, they prefer to remain deaf to their appeals. It seems that a fatality impels them, like the royalty of the eighteenth century, toward the precipice which will engulf them; for woe be to those who remain deaf to the cries of the starving, woe to those who, believing themselves of superior essence, assume the right to exploit those beneath them! There comes a time when the people no longer reason; they rise like a hurricane, and rush onward like a torrent. Then we see bleeding heads impaled on pikes.

Among the exploited, gentlemen, there are two classes of individuals. Those of one class, not realizing what they are and what they might be, take life as it comes, believe that they are born to be slaves, and content themselves with the little that is given them in exchange for their labor. But there are others, on the contrary, who think, who study and, looking about them, discover social iniquities. Is it their fault if they see clearly and suffer at seeing others suffer? Then they throw themselves into the struggle, and make themselves the bearers of the popular claims.

I know very well that I shall be told that I ought to have confined myself to speech for the vindication of the people's claims. But what can you expect! It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear. Too long have they answered our voices by imprisonment, the rope, and rifle-volleys. Make no mistake; the explosion of my bomb is not only the cry of the rebel Vaillant, but the cry of an entire class which vindicates its rights, and which will soon add acts to words. For, be sure of it, in vain will they pass laws. The ideas of the thinkers will not halt!

Beyond Human Might

BY BJÖRNSTJERNE BJÖRNSON

(A drama of modern industry. See page 221. The masters meet in a great castle, the home of one of them, to plan the destruction of the labor unions; whereupon a group of conspirators blow up the castle with dynamite. In the scene following the author gives his reflections upon this event, in the words of the grief-stricken sister of the chief conspirator)

HALDEN:--Suppose what has happened should arouse the conscience of the people?

RACHEL:--Why, that's what he was saying--his very words, I think--Arouse the conscience of the people! After all these thousands of years that we have been subject to the influence of the family and of religion, can it be possible that we are unable to arouse the people's conscience except by--O ye silent and exalted witnesses, who hear without answering and see without reflecting what you see, why don't you show me how to reach the upward road? For in the midst of all this misery there is no road that leads upward--nothing but an endless circling around the same spot, by which I perish!

HALDEN:--Upward means forward.

RACHEL:--But there is no forward in this! We have been thrown back into sheer barbarism! Once more all faith in a happy future has been wiped out. Just ask a few questions around here!... And then the sun, the spring--ever since that dreadful night--nothing but fine weather, night and day--a stretch of it the like of which I cannot recall. Is it not as if nature itself were crying out to us: "Shame! shame! You sprinkle my leaves with blood, and mingle death-cries with my song. You darken the air for me with your gruesome complaints." That's what it is saying to us. "You are soiling the spring for me. Your diseases and your evil thoughts are crouching in the woods and on the greenswards. Everywhere a stink of misery is following you like that of rotting waters." That's what it is telling us. "Your greed and your envy are a pair of sisters who have fought each other since they were born"--that's what it says. "Only my highest mountain peaks, only my sandy wastes and icy deserts, have not seen those sisters; every other part of the earth has been filled by them with blood and brutal bawling. In the midst of eternal glory mankind has invented Hell and manages to keep it filled. And men, who should stand for perfection, harbor among them what is worthless and foul."

Chillon

BY LORD BYRON

(Bonnivard, a patriot of Switzerland, was imprisoned with his sons in Chillon Castle. The story is told in Byron's longer poem, "The Prisoner of Chillon")

Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty, thou art--
For there thy habitation is the heart--
The heart which love of thee alone can bind;

And when thy sons to fetters are consign'd--
To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom--
Their country conquers with their martyrdom,
And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind.

Chillon! thy prison is a holy place,
And thy sad floor an altar; for 'twas trod
Until his very steps have left a trace
Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod,
By Bonnivard! May none those marks efface!
For they appeal from tyranny to God.