IT WAS a dark autumn night. The old banker was walking up and down his
study and remembering how, fifteen years before, he had given a party
one autumn evening. There had been many clever men there, and there had
been interesting conversations. Among other things they had talked of
capital punishment. The majority of the guests, among whom were many
journalists and intellectual men, disapproved of the death penalty. They
considered that form of punishment out of date, immoral, and unsuitable
for Christian States. In the opinion of some of them the death penalty
ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.
“I don’t agree with you,” said their host the banker. “I have not tried
either the death penalty or imprisonment for life, but if one may
judge _a priori_, the death penalty is more moral and more humane than
imprisonment for life. Capital punishment kills a man at once, but
lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly. Which executioner is the more
humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out
of you in the course of many years?”
“Both are equally immoral,” observed one of the guests, “for they both
have the same object--to take away life. The State is not God. It has
not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.”
Among the guests was a young lawyer, a young man of five-and-twenty.
When he was asked his opinion, he said:
“The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral, but if
I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life, I
would certainly choose the second. To live anyhow is better than not at
all.”
A lively discussion arose. The banker, who was younger and more nervous
in those days, was suddenly carried away by excitement; he struck the
table with his fist and shouted at the young man:
“It’s not true! I’ll bet you two millions you wouldn’t stay in solitary
confinement for five years.”
“If you mean that in earnest,” said the young man, “I’ll take the bet,
but I would stay not five but fifteen years.”
“Fifteen? Done!” cried the banker. “Gentlemen, I stake two millions!”
“Agreed! You stake your millions and I stake my freedom!” said the young
man.
And this wild, senseless bet was carried out! The banker, spoilt and
frivolous, with millions beyond his reckoning, was delighted at the bet.
At supper he made fun of the young man, and said:
“Think better of it, young man, while there is still time. To me two
millions are a trifle, but you are losing three or four of the best
years of your life. I say three or four, because you won’t stay longer.
Don’t forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a
great deal harder to bear than compulsory. The thought that you have
the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole
existence in prison. I am sorry for you.”
And now the banker, walking to and fro, remembered all this, and asked
himself: “What was the object of that bet? What is the good of that
man’s losing fifteen years of his life and my throwing away two
millions? Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than
imprisonment for life? No, no. It was all nonsensical and meaningless.
On my part it was the caprice of a pampered man, and on his part simple
greed for money....”
Then he remembered what followed that evening. It was decided that the
young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest
supervision in one of the lodges in the banker’s garden. It was agreed
that for fifteen years he should not be free to cross the threshold of
the lodge, to see human beings, to hear the human voice, or to receive
letters and newspapers. He was allowed to have a musical instrument and
books, and was allowed to write letters, to drink wine, and to smoke.
By the terms of the agreement, the only relations he could have with the
outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object. He
might have anything he wanted--books, music, wine, and so on--in any
quantity he desired by writing an order, but could only receive them
through the window. The agreement provided for every detail and every
trifle that would make his imprisonment strictly solitary, and bound the
young man to stay there _exactly_ fifteen years, beginning from twelve
o’clock of November 14, 1870, and ending at twelve o’clock of November
14, 1885. The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions, if
only two minutes before the end, released the banker from the obligation
to pay him two millions.
For the first year of his confinement, as far as one could judge from
his brief notes, the prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and
depression. The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day
and night from his lodge. He refused wine and tobacco. Wine, he wrote,
excites the desires, and desires are the worst foes of the prisoner; and
besides, nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing
no one. And tobacco spoilt the air of his room. In the first year the
books he sent for were principally of a light character; novels with a
complicated love plot, sensational and fantastic stories, and so on.
In the second year the piano was silent in the lodge, and the prisoner
asked only for the classics. In the fifth year music was audible again,
and the prisoner asked for wine. Those who watched him through the
window said that all that year he spent doing nothing but eating and
drinking and lying on his bed, frequently yawning and angrily talking to
himself. He did not read books. Sometimes at night he would sit down to
write; he would spend hours writing, and in the morning tear up all that
he had written. More than once he could be heard crying.
In the second half of the sixth year the prisoner began zealously
studying languages, philosophy, and history. He threw himself eagerly
into these studies--so much so that the banker had enough to do to get
him the books he ordered. In the course of four years some six hundred
volumes were procured at his request. It was during this period that the
banker received the following letter from his prisoner:
“My dear Jailer, I write you these lines in six languages. Show them to
people who know the languages. Let them read them. If they find not one
mistake I implore you to fire a shot in the garden. That shot will show
me that my efforts have not been thrown away. The geniuses of all ages
and of all lands speak different languages, but the same flame burns in
them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels
now from being able to understand them!” The prisoner’s desire was
fulfilled. The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden.
Then after the tenth year, the prisoner sat immovably at the table and
read nothing but the Gospel. It seemed strange to the banker that a man
who in four years had mastered six hundred learned volumes should waste
nearly a year over one thin book easy of comprehension. Theology and
histories of religion followed the Gospels.
In the last two years of his confinement the prisoner read an immense
quantity of books quite indiscriminately. At one time he was busy with
the natural sciences, then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare. There
were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry, and
a manual of medicine, and a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or
theology. His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the
wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching
first at one spar and then at another.