THE LONE BATTLE
During those months Harry's visible life had been turning in an endless
cycle of new-gained habit that ruled with vicious and numbing precision
the huge conglomerate of which he was but a single atom--a bitter,
dragging treadmill in which he was constrained to tramp steadily round
and round with the hands of the clock, marking time, as it were, in a
painful void that changed with mocking reverberations.
The spectre that had smiled its cruel smile at him from the shadow in
the little chamber back of the court-room had never left him. He had
thrust it from him with all his strength, but it had come again and
again to chuckle through the darkness.
"She!" it had sneered. "She for whom you risked and suffered so much!
She whose fine courage you counted on--who you dreamed would rush to
your defence, at any cost to herself! You need not have been afraid.
She would have risked nothing. She cared for you--yes. But she cares
a thousand times more for her place in the world's opinion. Why, she
would have married Craig--_married_ him!--rather than face a reflected
shame from a story affecting her father. So much reputation means to
her! Here you are in your stripes, a convict, and _she knows it_! She
knew all along! She doesn't guess you saw her in the court-room: she
didn't mean you to, of course. How she must have suffered from fear
that you would drag her into it! No doubt she is afraid you may repent
and call on her now to help you. Perhaps that is why she has gone
abroad. That is the real Echo Allen! That is the woman you have
loved!"
Should he call to her now, when she had left him to this suffering,
giving him no little word of trust or gratitude? A painful fiery pride
rose up in him. Not if his flesh was torn by red-hot pincers! Not in
endless years, though every day were a separate hell, till he died!
Never--never--never!
Seared by pride, tortured by despair, with the black agony of doubt
clinging to him like a coat-of-mail, memory dragged him backward
through infernos of suffering, thrusting its searching fingers into
each cranny of his mind, mocking him with shifting pictures cruelly
incongruous, that like a _camera obscura_ turned and turned about a
single focus--a grey old porch with Echo's figure leaning against a
pillar and he looking up into her face. As though he had been a
separate entity he saw himself moving through a thousand significant
scenes of the flame-swept past--the long-gone, dead and buried yet
living past--with her! And across these flitting outlines there
stamped itself the forbidding legend that his ghostly guide showed
Dante.... _Lasciate Ogni speranza_! By his own choice he had opened a
bottomless chasm between the then and now, between the Harry Sevier he
had been and the nameless convict branded by the righteous law, and
this chasm was impassible and enduring. Ten years of oblivion, of
loathsome existence under a number, of comradeship with felons, an
interminable blank unlighted by one glimpse of joy! Years in which, at
home, the mystery of his disappearance would pass from a
nine-days'-wonder to a diminishing speculation, a vague curiosity, and
at length to forgetfulness. His life, with its multiple ambitions, its
hopes and strivings--its love--had been spilled like water into sand;
there remained only the useless vessel, empty and dishonoured.
Time and again he experienced abrupt lapses into the blackest pit of
despair, when he grappled with an aching desire to be quit of the
puzzle of life, and by any one of a dozen means which lay at his hand,
to leap into freedom. But there was in him something deep-lying and
adamantine which forbade this solution.
Meanwhile time, after a fashion, went on. He breathed, ate and slept;
he saw the dawn look in at his narrow window and the silken blue dusk
drawn across its bars; his hands automatically performed mechanical
tasks, as did the hundreds of others about him; and gradually, out of
the very iteration of these homely things grew a passive equanimity,
destitute of human comfort yet bringing with it a kind of numb
acquiescence in which, though all unconsciously, his feet were feeling
for new foot-hold on the submerged highway of life. And at length
normal feeling, though dazed and bewildered, crept again to the
surface; he was once more conscious of the sun and air, of the scent of
green growing things that the breeze now and then wafted over the
masonry, of the grey pigeons that pecked crumbs in the court-yard, and
of the multitudinous human life that throbbed about him.
In all these months Paddy the Brick had been his cell-mate. By day in
the shop, that rumbled with the clacking din of the tireless
shoe-machines, they were separated. But they marched shoulder to
breast in the loathed lock-step, they sat side by side at dinner and
supper, and the iron bunks on which they slept--Harry on the upper
one--were but a few feet apart. During the first days, while they were
together in the cell, the other had watched him glumly and
suspiciously, speaking only when he must and then morosely, so that
Harry had wondered dully whether that whirl of rage in which he had
smashed the flask of whisky against the window-bars had not further
embittered his lot by an irreparable enmity.
More than once, by the devious means known to such places, Paddy the
Brick had procured whisky, and this--though he risked offering no more
to his companion but drank it secretly in his bunk at night--had put
Harry through other bitter tests of self-control. For the wilful
license of the day on which he had ceased to be Harry Sevier had
granted fresh and terrible power to the cringing thing that had been
mastered and manacled, and the fight he had fought out in that long
year Harry had had again to renew, and now without the zest of reward.
Again and again, as he sat in his cell, or fed the pungent leathern
strips into the clacking shoe-machines in the shop, without warning the
demon of thirst had swooped upon him, making his dry throat ache with
uncontrollable longing, his palms tingle with itching desire: and at
times, when he awoke gasping with the reeking fumes in his nostrils,
and heard the gurgle of the liquor in the dark, he had fought with a
strenuous desire to fling himself bodily upon his companion and snatch
the drink to his own arid lips--fought till the struggle turned him
faint with anger, disgust and self-contempt.
What lent him in these bitter months the strength for this unequal
struggle? Most of all the knowledge that the appetite which he now
grappled with in himself, was the patron Genius of that house of Pain.
He had learned it from his fellows there, in whose faces alcohol had
set its recognisable marks, its baleful brands of ownership. He knew
it from a score of dismal histories related by his incorrigible
cell-mate, daily allusions, the famished eagerness with which the
surreptitious flask was passed from hand to hand. The Spirit of Drink
had seemed to him at length to sprawl, a huge, lethargic incubus, over
that tortured congeries of crime. Till slowly, very slowly--as human
feeling had earlier come to him out of his blankness and torpor--there
had dawned in him a mute consciousness of a victory over himself that
was to be enduring. The conquest he had thought he had made in that
first year of studied avoidance had been no true one. Under stress of
anger, grief and resentment, it had fallen in shameful and utter
defeat. The real victory that he knew now, had come to him in that
prison garb, when black despair had sat by his side through long
months--the fruit of a strength born of familiar hand-touch with evil
temptation and a hatred of the tempter.
As time went on, the surly mood of his cell-mate had grown less
difficult, had even softened to a sneering tolerance.
"You're improving!" he said one day with a smirk. "So you're making up
to the Gospel-Sharp, eh?"
It was a Sunday, when the shops were empty and silent, and the long
grey-black serpentine, with its hitching lock-step, had wound to the
Chapel for the weekly platitudes and then back to the clammy, wintry
dormitory, to drop its human links at their numbered cells. That day
for the first time, the plodding, oleaginous chaplain had noted the new
figure in the stolid ranks and had stopped to speak to him--a
commonplace to which Harry had responded with a mere word.
"You'd better make up to the Warden!" Paddy the Brick continued. "He's
the cock-of-the-walk here. I'd like to smash that oily face of his!"
"I've nothing against him," replied Harry evenly. "He does what he's
here to do."
"He'd better keep his nose in his office," said the other darkly.
"He'll walk through the shops once too often! I know a man around the
corner who'd give his neck to 'get' him--he's a lifer, and nothing
makes much difference to him!"
He crossed the narrow cell as he spoke, and sitting on one of the
three-legged stools that constituted the cell's only movable furniture,
took a bent tin spoon from under his jacket and began to tap upon the
wall. Harry had sometimes seen him at this occupation--a kind of crude
signalling he had thought it. Now, however, some rhythm in the sound
caught him, reminding him of the click of the keys in a telegraph
office. "What is that you are doing?" he asked, as the other stopped.
"Doing?" Paddy the Brick turned his narrow eyes over his shoulder.
"I've been having a chat with an old pal of mine in the upper tier.
That's what."
"Talking?"
"Yes. It's the prison-wireless. Didn't you ever hear of that?"
"No."
The other rose and pulled away the blanket from the foot of his bunk.
There in the whitewashed wall was a double row of minute scratches.
"That's the alphabet," he said. "It's mighty handy--we work it by
relay. I can call up any cell on this side in fifteen minutes. Better
learn it," he added jeeringly. "You'll have plenty of time!"
Harry's gaze turned back to the little barred window with its meagre
square of blue. The time he had been there was to be measured only by
months, yet how century-long had dragged the leaden-footed procession!
His painful reverie was broken by Paddy the Brick's voice, jarring and
malicious:
"Ever read the Bible?"
The other had taken the small dingy volume--the sole book the place
afforded--from its shelf, and was lying on his back on his bunk, his
eyes peering over its rim.
"Yes," answered Harry, slowly. "Why?"
"I've found one good thing in it: '_Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for
ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne._' Ho-ho!" he chuckled.
"Reckon I'll ask old Coffin-Face to preach on it next Sunday in Chapel.
I'd sure enjoy it. I had a lawyer once--_damn_ him!"
The flare of evil passion in the closing epithet seemed to Harry like a
wicked spurt of flame from some sudden crack in cooling lava, leaping
out to sear him. His face was turned away--toward the little square of
barred window--and his voice was hoarser than usual, as he asked:
"Why do you hate him so?"
Paddy the Brick hurled the Bible into the corner with an imprecation.
He rose to a sitting posture, his features working.
"Because he did it for me!" he said. "He might have cleared me ... and
he didn't try. And I never took the money they said I stole--never, so
help me! It was a put-up job. They 'planted' the stuff on me, when I
was drunk. It was a pay-day and I knew they were up to something, for
they'd sworn they'd drive me out of the logging-camp--and yet I hadn't
sense enough to keep sober!" He gave a harsh and bitter laugh, and his
voice rose. "But it was my lawyer friend that really did the business!
He was a dead swell--one of your la-de-das with money and
automobiles--that played at lawyering. They told me he was a great man
and I was fool enough to believe them. What did he care for my
case--it was a little one to him! I was nothing but a lumberjack! Why
should he soil his kid gloves with me?"
He turned to Harry's white face a livid countenance. "So now I'm
here," he finished, "and I don't give a rip if I am, either!"
"_Woe unto you also, ye lawyers!_" Parallel with the wholesale
indictment another text in that self-same book was flashing through
Harry's mind: "_For with what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged, and
with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again._" Was
that, after all, no trite generality applicable to a hypothetical
hereafter, but a thing true in the minute and multinomial affairs of
the present? Did chance, or fate--or whatever the human mind called
the great _Deus ex Machina_--watch somewhere, with hand upon the lever,
adjusting the nice balance to the subtle requirements of some occult
law of retribution that, though hidden, was yet as certain as
gravitation?
As Harry saw the reddened eyes glowing with hatred, the curving
fingers, the crouching figure, he said to himself, "This is my
work--mine and whisky's. He was a simple woodman who laboured six days
of the week and on the seventh traded half his wages for 'moonshine'
from some illicit mountain still. Whisky set his feet in the toils,
yet but for me he might have lived there forever in the timber,
treading his narrow groove like a blind horse on a ferry, not one whit
worse than his fellows, with no agonised conscience, a simple product
of his environment. But I--and whisky--fastened the bonds upon him. I
did it. I sent him here. I gave him hatred of society, the warfare
that has already marked him with the mark of the beast. This is what I
did. And now I am plucked up from my place and planted here beside
him, as soiled in the eyes of the world as he! Is it because I was the
instrument of his demoralisation that the tables have now been
turned?--because he who takes the sword shall perish by the sword? And
in the last great evening-up, is it written that I shall become even as
he?--that bars and chains shall have their will of me and I emerge at
last, like this incorrigible _ruine_, hard, debased, besotted, beyond
hope or redemption in the world?" He shuddered. Better even that that
shot in the library had gone home--that he now lay, innocent as he was,
with the red mark on his throat, down in the horrible quick-lime!
He rose, and with his hands gripping the bars of the open door, drew a
long breath. No! whatever this pent-house did to him, it should never
drag him down! He would take his medicine. For what, in his egregious
folly and egotism, he had done, he would pay--if fate demanded, to the
uttermost farthing. But out of its prison his soul, sometime, should
come unblanched, and unabashed!