I have been requested to tell this story, and exactly as it happened.
The moral any man may draw for himself. I only want to ask my readers
the question I have been asking myself ever since I saw the girl: Why
should such things be among us?
* * * * *
Marny's studio is over the Art Club.
He was at work on a picture of a cañon with some Sioux Indians in the
foreground, while I sat beside him, watching the play of his
masterly brush.
Dear old Aunt Chloe, in white apron and red bandanna, her round black
face dimpled with smiles, was busying herself about the room,
straightening the rugs, puffing up the cushions of the divan, pushing
back the easels to get at the burnt ends of abandoned cigarettes, doing
her best, indeed, to bring some kind of domestic order out of Marny's
Bohemian chaos.
Now and then she interpolated her efforts with such remarks as:
"No, doan' move. De Colonel"--her sobriquet for Marny--"doan' keer whar
he drap his seegars. But doan' you move, honey"--sobriquet for me. "I
kin git 'em." Or "Clar to goodness, you pillows look like a passel o'
hogs done tromple ye, yo're dat mussed." Critical remarks like these
last were given in a low tone, and, although addressed to the offending
articles themselves, accompanied by sundry cuffs of her big hand, were
really intended to convey Aunt Chloe's private opinion of the habits of
her master and his friends.
The talk had drifted from men of the old frontier to border scouts, and
then to the Kentucky mountaineers, whom Marny knows as thoroughly as he
does the red men.
"They are a great race, these mountaineers," he said to me, as he tossed
the end of another cigarette on Aunt Chloe's now clean-swept floor.
Marny spoke in crisp, detached sentences between the pats of his brush.
"Big, strong, whalebone-and-steel kind of fellows; rather fight than
eat. Quick as lightning with a gun; dead shots. Built just like our
border men. See that scout astride of his horse?"--and he pointed with
his mahl-stick to a sketch on the wall behind him--"looks like the real
thing, don't he? Well, I painted him from an up-country moonshiner.
Found him one morning across the river, leaning up against a telegraph
pole, dead broke. Been arrested on a false charge of making whiskey
without a license, and had just been discharged from the jail. Hadn't
money enough to cross the bridge, and was half-starved. So I braced him
up a little, and brought him here and painted him."
We all know with what heartiness Marny can "brace." It doubtless took
three cups of coffee, half a ham, and a loaf of bread to get him on his
feet, Marny watching him with the utmost satisfaction until the process
was complete.
"You ought to look these fellows over; they're worth it. Savage lot,
some of 'em. Remind me of the people who live about the foothills of the
Balkans. Mountaineers are the same the world over, anyway. But you don't
want to hunt for these Kentuckians in their own homes unless you send
word you are coming, or you may run up against the end of a rifle before
you know it. I don't blame them." Marny leaned back in his chair and
turned toward me. "The Government is always hunting them as if they were
wild beasts, instead of treating them as human beings. They can't
understand why they shouldn't get the best prices they can for their
corn. They work hard enough to get it to grow. Their theory is that the
Illinois farmer feeds the corn to his hogs and sells the product as
pork, while the mountaineer feeds it to his still and sells the product
to his neighbors as whiskey. That a lot of Congressmen who never hoed a
row of corn in their lives, nor ran a furrow, or knew what it was to
starve on the proceeds, should make laws sending a man to jail because
he wants to supply his friends with liquor, is what riles them, and I
don't blame them for that, either."
I arose from my chair and examined the sketch of the starving
mountaineer. It was a careful study of a man with clear-cut features,
slim and of wiry build, and was painted with that mastery of detail
which distinguishes Marny's work over that of every other figure-painter
of his time.
The painter squeezed a tube of white on his palette, relit his
cigarette, fumbled over his sheaf of brushes and continued:
"The first of every month--just about now, by the way--they bring twenty
or thirty of these poor devils down from the mountains and lock them up
in Covington jail. They pass Aunt Chloe's house. Oh, Aunt Chloe!"--and
he turned to the old woman--"did you see any of those 'wild people' the
last two or three days?--that's what she calls 'em," and he laughed.
"Dat I did, Colonel--hull drove on 'em. 'Nough to make a body sick to
see 'em. Two on 'em was chained together. Dat ain't no way to treat
people, if dey is ornery. I wouldn't treat a dog dat way."
Aunt Chloe, sole dependence of the Art Club below-stairs: day or night
nurse--every student in the place knows the touch of her hand when his
head splits with fever or his bones ache with cold; provider of buttons,
suspender loops and buckles; go-between in most secret and confidential
affairs; mail-carrier--the dainty note wrapped up in her handkerchief so
as not to "spile it!"--no, _she_ wouldn't treat a dog that way, nor
anything else that lives and breathes or has feeling, human or brute.
"If there's a new 'drove' of them, as Aunt Chloe says," remarked Marny,
tossing aside his brushes, "let's take a look at them. They are worth
your study. You may never have another chance."
This was why it happened that within the hour Marny and I crossed the
bridge and left his studio and the city behind us.
The river below was alive with boats, the clouds of steam from their
funnels wreathed about the spans. Street-cars blocked the roadway;
tugging horses, sweating under the lash of their drivers' whips,
strained under heavy loads. The air was heavy with coal-smoke. Through
the gloom of the haze, close to the opposite bank, rose a grim, square
building of granite and brick, its grimy windows blinking through iron
bars. Behind these, shut out from summer clouds and winter snows, bereft
of air and sunshine, deaf to the song of happy birds and the low hum of
wandering bees, languished the outcast and the innocent, the vicious and
the cruel. Hells like these are the infernos civilization builds in
which to hide its mistakes.
Marny turned toward me as we reached the prison. "Keep close," he
whispered. "I know the Warden and can get in without a permit," and he
mounted the steps and entered a big door opening into a cold, bare hall
with a sanded floor. To the right of the hall swung another door
labelled "Chief of Police." Behind this door was a high railing closed
with a wooden gate. Over this scowled an officer in uniform.
"My friend Sergeant Cram," said Marny, as he introduced us. The officer
and I shook hands. The hand was thick and hard, the knotted knuckles
leaving an unpleasant impression behind them as they fell from
my fingers.
A second door immediately behind this one was now reached, the Sergeant
acting as guide. This door was of solid wood, with a square panel cut
from its centre, the opening barred like a birdcage. Peering through
these bars was the face of another attendant. This third door, at a
mumbled word from the Sergeant, was opened wide enough to admit us into
a room in which half a dozen deputies were seated at cards. In the
opposite wall hung a fourth door, of steel and heavily barred, through
which, level with the eyes, was cut a peep-hole concealed by a swinging
steel disk.
The Sergeant moved rapidly across the room, pushed aside the disk and
brought to view the nose and eyes of a prison guard.
As our guide shot back a bolt, a click like the cocking of a gun sounded
through the room, followed by the jangle of a huge iron ring strung with
keys. Selecting one from the number, he pushed it into the key-hole and
threw his weight against the door. At its touch the mass of steel swung
inward noiselessly as the door of a bank-vault. With the swinging of the
door there reached us the hot, stuffy smell of unwashed bodies under
steam-heat--the unmistakable odor that one sometimes meets in a
court-room.
Marny and I stepped inside. The Sergeant closed the slab of steel,
locking us inside, and then, nodding to us through the peep-hole,
returned to his post in the office.
We stood now on the rim of the crater, looking straight into the
inferno. By means of the dull light that struggled through the grimy,
grated windows, I discovered that we were in a corridor having an iron
floor that sprang up and down under our feet. This was flanked by a line
of steel cages--huge beast-dens really--reaching to the ceiling. In each
of these cages was a small, double-barred gate.
These dens were filled with men and boys; some with faces thrust through
the bars, some with hands and arms stretched out as if for air; one hung
half-way up the bars, clinging with hands and feet apart, as if to get
a better hold and better view. I had seen dens like these before: the
man-eating Bengal tiger at the London Zoo lives in one of them.
The Warden, who was standing immediately behind the attendant, stepped
forward and shook Marny's hand. I discharged my obligations with a nod.
I had never been in a place like this before, and the horror of its
surroundings overcame me. I misjudged the Warden, no doubt. That this
man might have a wife who loved him and little children who clung to his
neck, and that underneath his hard, forbidding exterior a heart could
beat with any tenderness, never occurred to me. As I looked him over
with a half-shrinking glance, I became aware of a slash indenting his
pock-marked cheek that might have been made by a sabre cut--was,
probably, for it takes a brave man to be a warden; a massive head set on
big shoulders; a square chin, the jaw hinged like a burglar's jimmy; and
two keen, restless, elephant eyes.
But it was his right ear that absorbed my attention--or rather, what was
left of his right ear. Only the point of it stuck up; the rest was
clipped as clean as a rat-terrier's. Some fight to a finish, I thought;
some quick upper-cut of the razor of a frenzied negro writhing under the
viselike grasp of this man-gorilla with arms and hands of steel; or some
sudden whirl of a stiletto, perhaps, which had missed his heart and
taken his ear. I did not ask then, and I do not know now. It was a badge
of courage, whatever it was--a badge which thrilled and horrified me. As
I looked at the terrible mutilation, I could but recall the hideous
fascination that overcame Josiane, the heroine of Hugo's great novel,
"The Man Who Laughs," when she first caught sight of Gwynplaine's
mouth--slit from ear to ear by the Comprachicos. The outrage on the
Warden was not so grotesque, but the effect was the same.
I moved along the corridor and stood before the beasts. One, an old man
in a long white beard, leathery, sun-tanned face and hooked nose,
clasped the bars with both hands, gazing at us intently. I recognized
his kind the moment I looked at him. He was like my Jonathan Gordon, my
old fisherman who lived up in the Franconia Notch. His coarse, homespun
clothes, dyed brown with walnut-shells, slouch hat crowning his shock of
gray hair, and hickory shirt open at the throat, only heightened the
resemblance; especially the hat canted over one eye. Why he wore the hat
in such a place I could not understand, unless to be ready for departure
when his summons came.
There were eight other beasts besides this old man in the same cage, one
a boy of twenty, who leaned against the iron wall with his hands in his
pockets, his eyes following my every movement. I noticed a new blue
patch on one of his knees, which his mother, doubtless, had sewn with
her own hands, her big-rimmed spectacles on her nose, the tallow dip
lighting the log cabin. I recognized the touch. And the boy. I used to
go swimming with one just like him, forty years ago, in an old
swimming-hole in the back pasture, and hunt for honey that the
bumblebees had stored under the bank.
The old man with the beard and the canting hat looked into my eyes
keenly, but he did not speak. He had nothing to say, perhaps. Something
human had moved before him, that was all; something that could come and
go at its pleasure and break the monotony of endless hours.
"How long have you been here?" I asked, lowering my voice and stepping
closer to the bars.
Somehow I did not want the others to hear. It was almost as though I
were talking to Jonathan--my dear Jonathan--and he behind bars!
"Eleven months and three days. Reckon I be the oldest"--and he looked
about him as if for confirmation. "Yes, reckon I be."
"What for?"
"Sellin'."
The answer came without the slightest hesitation and without the
slightest trace in his voice of anything that betokened either sorrow
for his act or shame for the crime.
"Eleven months and three days of this!" I repeated to myself.
Instinctively my mind went back to all I had done, seen, and enjoyed in
these eleven months and three days. Certain individual incidents more
delightful than others stood out clear and distinct: that day under the
trees at Cookham, the Thames slipping past, the white-sailed clouds
above my tent of leaves; a morning at Dort, when Peter and I watched the
Dutch luggers anchor off the quay, and the big storm came up; a night
beyond San Giorgio, when Luigi steered the gondola in mid-air over a sea
of mirrored stars and beneath a million incandescent lamps.
I passed on to the next cage, Marny watching me but saying nothing. The
scout was in this one, the "type" in Marny's sketch. There were three of
them--tall, hickory-sapling sort of young fellows, with straight legs,
flat stomachs, and thin necks, like that of a race-horse. One had the
look of an eagle, with his beak-nose and deep-set, uncowed eyes. Another
wore his yellow hair long on his neck, Custer-fashion. The third sat on
the iron floor, his knees level with his chin, his head in his hand. He
had a sweetheart, perhaps, who loved him, or an old mother who was
wringing her hands at home. This one, I learned afterward, had come with
the last batch and was not yet accustomed to his surroundings; the
others had been awaiting trial for months. All of them wore homespun
clothes--not the ready-made clothes sold at the stores, but those that
some woman at home had cut, basted, and sewn.
Marny asked them what they were up for. Their answers differed slightly
from that of the old man, but the crime and its penalty were the same.
"Makin'," they severally replied.
There was no lowering of the eyelids when they confessed; no hangdog
look about the mouth. They would do it again when they got out, and they
intended to, only they would shoot the quicker next time. The earth was
theirs and the fulness thereof, that part of it which they owned. Their
grandfathers before them had turned their corn into whiskey and no man
had said nay, and so would they. Not the corn that they had stolen, but
the corn that they had ploughed and shucked. It was their corn, not the
Government's. Men who live in the wilderness, and feed and clothe
themselves on the things they raise with their own hands, have no
fine-spun theories about the laws that provide revenue for a Government
they never saw, don't want to see, and couldn't understand if they did.
Marny and I stood before the grating, looking each man over separately.
Strange to say, the artistic possibilities of my visit faded out of my
mind. The picturesqueness of their attire, the browns and grays
accentuated here and there by a dash of red around a hat-band or
shirt-collar--all material for my own or my friend's brush--made not
the slightest impression upon me. It was the close smell, the dim,
horrible light, the quick gleam of a pair of eyes looking out from under
shocks of matted hair--the eyes of a panther watching his prey; the dull
stare of some boyish face with all hope crushed out of it; these were
the things that possessed me.
As I stood there absorbed in the terrors before me, I was startled by
the click of the catch and the clink of keys, followed by the noiseless
swing of the steel door as it closed again.