I am finally called downstairs. The sun streaming through the narrow
bars gives the gloomy prison almost a bright appearance. Hastily I put
on my street clothes. I feel like a man putting on a strange, exotic
costume for a fancy dress ball; the collar and necktie seem to choke me
with a kind of joy and affection. Accompanied by my lawyer, I walk out
of the fateful gates, and then I turn to look back, and to glance
upwards to the hospital windows where the patients and the old keeper
wave a friendly salute and farewell.
Friends are waiting to greet me at the other side of the river. I look
in wonder and amaze at the people in the streets. Everything is so
interesting; the most commonplace and sordid sights are delightful and
picturesque. The men; the women, with their wonderful clothes; the sky,
the houses, the cars, the signs, everything, seem so novel, so friendly;
every minute so precious, so full of surprises and possibilities.
I have grown fat and pale in prison, but my spirit is as light and quick
as the spirit of a humming bird. Everybody greets me as a traveller
returned from a strange, unknown, and very distant land--and yet all the
while I have been living in the very heart of the metropolis. Everybody
seems to realize and to reassure me that the acceptance of a pardon
would have been a grievous mistake. To refuse it meant a great
sacrifice, but making that sacrifice has confirmed a general suspicion
that unfair methods, dangerous to American traditions, have been used
against me.
The day of reckoning will come in time. Meanwhile, how beautiful,
perfect, intoxicating is the sense of untrammelled liberty! It repays me
for many a dark, tragic hour.