Lydia and her guard arrived at the prison early in the evening. She had
been travelling all through the hot, bright September day. For the first
hour she had been only aware of the proximity of the guard, of the
crowded car, the mingled smell of oranges and coal smoke, the newspaper
on the floor, trodden by every foot, containing probably an account of
her departure for her long imprisonment. Then, her eyes wandering to the
river, she suddenly remembered that it would be years before she saw
mountains and flowing water again. Perhaps she would never see them
again.
During the previous winter she had gone with Benny and Mrs. Galton to
visit a prison in a neighboring state--a man's prison. It was considered
an unfortunate example. Scenes from that visit came back to her in a
series of pictures. A giant negro highwayman weaving at an immense loom
with a heavy, hopeless regularity. Black, airless punishment
cells--"never used nowadays," the warden had said lightly, and had been
corrected by a low murmur from the keeper; two of them were in use at
the moment. The tiers of ordinary cells, not so very much better, with
their barred loopholes. And the smells--the terrible prison smells. At
their best, disinfectant and stale soap; at worst--Lydia never knew that
it was possible to remember a smell as she now remembered that one. But
most of all she remembered the chalky pallor of some of the prisoners,
some obviously tubercular, others twitching with nervous affections. She
doubted coolly if many people were strong enough to go through years of
that sort of thing.
So she would look at the river as if she might never see it again.
They were already in the Highlands, and the hills on the eastern
side--her side of the river--were throwing a morning shadow on the
water, while across the way the white marble buildings at West Point
shone in the sunlight. Storm King with its abrupt bulk interposed itself
between the two sections of new road--the road which Lydia had so much
desired to see finished. She and Bobby had had a plan to motor along it
to the Emmonses some day--Newburgh. There was a hotel there where she
had stopped once for luncheon on her way to Tuxedo from somewhere or
other. Then presently the bridge at Poughkeepsie, and then the station
at which she had got out when she had spent Sunday with the Emmonses,
the day Evans had been arrested and had confessed to that man----There
was the very pillar she had waited beside while the chauffeur looked up
her bags. Now the river began to narrow, there were marshy islands in
it, and huge shaky ice houses along the brink. It all unrolled before
her like a picture that she was never going to see again. Then Albany,
set on its hills, and the train, turning sharply, rumbled over the
bridge into the blackened station. Almost everybody in the car got out
here, for the train stopped some time; but she and her guard remained
sitting silently side by side. Then presently they were going on again,
through the beautiful wide fertile valley of the Mohawk----They were
getting near, very near. She felt not frightened but physically sick.
She wondered if her hair would be cut short. Of course it would. It
seemed to her like an indignity committed by O'Bannon's own hand.
It was dark when they reached the station, so dark that she could not
get a definite idea of anything but the great wall of the prison, and
the clang of the unbarring of the great gate. Later she came to know the
doorway with its incongruous beauty--the white door with its fanlight
and side windows, and two low stairways curving up to it, and, above,
the ironwork porch, supported on square ironwork columns of a leaf
pattern, suggestive somehow of an old wistaria vine. But now she knew
nothing between the gate and the opening of the front door.
She entered what might have been the wide hall of an old-fashioned and
extraordinarily bare country house. A wide stairway rose straight before
her, and wide, old-fashioned doors opened formally to left and right.
She was taken into the room at the right--the matron's room. While her
name and age and crime were being registered she stood staring straight
before her where bookshelves ran to the ceiling. She could recognise
familiar bindings--the works of Marion Crawford and Mrs. Humphry Ward.
Calm brown-eyed women seemed to surround her, but she would not even
look at them. Their impersonal kindness seemed to be founded on the
insulting knowledge of her utter helplessness. They chatted a little
with the guard who had brought her. Was the train late? Well, not as bad
as last time.
She wondered how soon they would cut her hair.
After a little while she was taken through a long corridor directly to a
spacious bathroom. Her clothes, wrapped in a sheet, were borne away. At
this Lydia gave a short laugh. It pleased her as a sign that the routine
in her case was palpably ridiculous--to take away her things as if they
were infected. She was given a bath, a nightgown of most unfriendly
texture was handed to her, and presently she was locked in her
cell--still in possession of her hair.
She felt like an animal in a trap--could imagine herself running along
the floor smelling at cracks for some hope of escape, with that strange
head motion, up and down, up and down, of a newly caged animal.
More even than the locks and bolts, she minded the open grille in the
door, like an eye through which she might at any moment of the day or
night be spied upon. At every footstep she prepared herself to meet with
a defiant stare the eyes of an inspector. The cell was hardly a cell,
but a room larger than most hall bedrooms. The bed had a white cover; so
had the table; and the window, though barred, was large. But this made
no impression on Lydia. She was conscious of being locked in. Only her
pride and her hard common sense kept her from beating at the door with
her bare hands and making one of those screaming outbreaks so familiar
to prison officials.
She who had never been coerced was now to be coerced in every action,
surrounded everywhere by symbols of coercion. She who had been so
intense an individualist that she had discarded a French model if she
saw other women wearing it was now to wear a striped gingham dress of
universal pattern. She whose competent white hands had never done a
piece of useful work was sentenced to not less than three or more than
seven years of hard labor. What would that be--hard labor? The vision of
that giant negro working hopelessly at his loom was before her all night
long.
All night long she wandered up and down her cell, now and then laying
her hand on the door to assure herself of the incredible fact that it
was locked. Only for a few minutes at dawn she fell asleep, forgetting
the catastrophe, the malignant fate that had overtaken her, and woke
imagining herself at home.
When her cell door was unlocked she stepped out into the same corridor
along which she had passed the night before. She found it a blaze of
sunlight. Great patches of sunlight fell in barred patterns on the
boards of the floor, scrubbed as white as the deck of a man-of-war.
Remembering the gloomy granite loopholes of her imagination, this sun
seemed insolently bright.
The law compels every prisoner, unless specially exempted, to spend an
hour a day in school. Lydia's examination was satisfactory enough to
exempt her, but she was set to work in the schoolroom, giving out books,
helping with papers, erasing the blackboards, collecting the chalk and
erasers. In this way the whole population of the prison--about
seventy-five women--passed before her in the different grades. She might
have found interest and opportunity, but she was in no humor to be
cooperative.
She sat there despising them all, feeling her own essential
difference--from the bright-eyed Italian girl who had known no English
eighteen months before and was now so industrious a student, to the
large, calm, unbelievably good-tempered teacher. The atmosphere of the
room was not that of a prison school but of a kindergarten. That was
what annoyed Lydia--that these women seemed to like to learn. They
spelled with enthusiasm--these grown women. Up and down pages they
went, spelling "passenger" and "transfer" and "station"--it was
evidently a lesson about a trolley car. Was she, Lydia Thorne, expected
to join joyfully in some such child-like discipline? In mental
arithmetic the competition grew keener. Muriel, a soft-voiced colored
girl, made eight and seven amount to thirteen. The class laughed gayly.
Lydia covered her face with her hands.
"Oh," she thought, "he might better have killed me than this!"
It seemed to her that this terrible impersonal routine was turning on
her like a great wheel and grinding her into the earth. What incredible
perversity it Was that no one--no prisoner, no guard, not even the
clear-eyed matron--would see the obvious fact that she was not a
criminal as these others were.
Had O'Bannon's power reached even into the isolation of prison and
dictated that she should be treated like everyone else--she who was so
different from these uneducated, emotional, unstable beings about her?
It was her former maid, Evans, who destroyed this illusion. The
different wards of the prison ate separately; and as Evans was not in
her ward they did not meet during the day. They met in the hour after
tea, before the prisoners were locked in their cells for the night; an
hour when in the large hall they were allowed to read and talk and sew
and tat--tatting was very popular just then.
Lydia had sunk into a rocking-chair. She could not fix her mind on a
book, and she did not know how to sew or tat, and talk for talk's sake
had never been one of her amusements. She was thinking "One day has gone
by out of perhaps seven years. In seven years I shall be thirty-three,"
when she felt some one approaching her, and looking up she saw it was
Evans.
Evans, in a striped cotton, did not look so different from the lady's
maid of the old days, except, as Lydia noticed with vague surprise, she
had put on weight. She came with the hurried walk that made her skirts
flip out at her heels--the same walk with which she used to come when
she was late to dress Lydia for dinner. She almost expected to hear the
familiar, "What will you wear, miss?" A dozen memories flashed into her
mind--Evans polishing her jewels in the sunlight, Evans locked in the
disordered bedroom refusing her confidence to everyone, and then
collapsing and confessing to "that man."
She looked away from the approaching figure, hoping the girl would take
the hint; but no, Evans was drawing up a chair with something of the
manner of a hostess to a new arrival.
"Oh, Evans!" was Lydia's greeting, very much in her old manner.
"You'd better call me Louisa here--I mean, it's first names we use,"
said Evans.
The fact had already been called to her former employer's attention by
Muriel, who had done nothing but call her Lydia in a futile effort to be
friendly. She steeled herself to hear it from Evans, who, however,
managed to avoid it. She gossiped of the prison news, and tried to cheer
and help this newcomer with whatever wisdom she had acquired. Lydia
neither moved nor answered nor again looked up.
"As the matron says," Evans ran on, "the worst is over when you get
here. It's the trial and the sentence and the journey that's worst.
After a week or so you'll begin to get used to it."
Lydia's nostrils trembled.
"I shall never get used to it," she said. "I don't belong here. What I
did was no crime."
There was a short pause. Lydia waited for Evans' cordial agreement to
what seemed a self-evident assertion. None came. Instead she said
gently, as she might have explained to a child, "Oh, miss, they all
think that!"
"Think what?"
"That what they did was no real harm--that they were unjustly condemned.
There isn't one here who won't tell you that. The worse they are the
more they think it."
Lydia had looked up from her contemplation of the gray rag rug. No
sermon could have stopped her as short as that--the idea that she was
exactly like all the other inmates. She protested, more to herself than
to Evans.
"But it is different! What I did was an accident, not a deliberate
crime."
Evans smiled her old, rare, gentle smile.
"But the law says it was a crime."
Horrible! Horrible but true! Lydia was to find that every woman there
felt exactly as she did; that she was a special case; that she had done
nothing wrong; that her conviction had been brought about by an
incompetent lawyer, a vindictive district attorney, a bribed jury, a
perjured witness. The first thing each of them wanted to explain was
that she--like Lydia--was a special case.
The innocent-looking little girl who had committed bigamy. "Isn't it to
laugh?" said she. "Gee, when you think what men do to us! And I get five
years for not knowing he was dead! And what harm did I do him anyway?"
And the gaunt elderly stenographer who had run an illicit mail-order
business for her employers. One of them had evidently occupied her whole
horizon, taking the place of all law, moral and judicial.
"He said it was positively legal," she kept repeating, believing
evidently that the judge and jury had been pitifully misinformed.
And there was the stout middle-aged woman with sandy hair and a bland
competent manner--she was competent. She had made a specialty of
real-estate frauds.
"I was entirely within the law," she said, as one hardly interested to
argue the matter.
And there were gay young mulatto girls and bright-eyed Italians, who all
said the same thing--"everyone does it; only the other girl squealed on
me"--and there were the egotists, who were never going to get into this
mess again. Some girls had to steal for a living; they had brains enough
to go straight. Even the woman who had attempted to kill her husband
felt she had been absolutely within her rights and after hearing her
story Lydia was inclined to agree with her.
Only Evans seemed to feel that her sentence had been just.
"No, it wasn't right what I did," she said, and she stood out like a
star, superior to her surroundings. She only was learning and growing in
the terrible routine. It soon began to seem to Lydia that this little
fool of a maid of hers was a great person. Why?
Locked in her cell from dark to daylight, Lydia spent much of the time
in thinking. Like a great many people in this world, she had never
thought before. She had particularly arranged her life so she should not
think. Most people who think they think really dream. Lydia was no
dreamer. She lacked the romantic imagination that makes dreams magical.
Clear-sighted and pessimistic when she looked at life, the reality had
seemed hideous, and she looked away as quickly as possible, looked back
to the material beauty with which she had surrounded herself and the
pleasant activities always within reach. Now, cut off from pleasure and
beauty, it seemed to her for the first time as if there were a real
adventure in having the courage to examine the whole scheme of life. Its
pattern could hardly be more hideous than that of every day.
What was she? What reason had she for living? What use could life be put
to? What was the truth?
A verse she could not place kept running through her head:
_Quand j'ai connu la Verite,
J'ai cru que c'etait une amie;
Quand je l'ai comprise et sentie,
J'en etais deja degoute._
_Et pourtant elle est eternelle,
Et ceux qui se sont passes d'elle
Ici-bas ont tout ignore._
She had been deliberately ignorant of much of life--of everything.
She went through a period of despair, all the worse because, like a face
in a nightmare, it was featureless. It was despair, not over the fact
that she was in prison but over the whole scheme of the universe, the
futile hordes of human beings living and hoping and failing and passing
away.
Despair paralyzed her bodily activities. Her mind, even her giant will,
failed her. She could neither sleep nor eat, and after a week of it was
taken to the hospital. The rumor ran through the prison that she was
going mad--that was the way it always began. She lay in the hospital two
days, hardly moving. Her face seemed to have shrunk and her eyes to have
grown large and fiery. The doctor came and talked to her. She would not
answer him; she would not meet his gaze; she would do nothing but draw
long unnatural breaths like sighs.
In the room next to her there was a mother with a six-months-old baby.
Lydia at the best of times had never been much interested in babies,
though all young animals made a certain appeal to her. Her friends'
babies, swaddled and guarded by nurses, lacked the spontaneous charm of
a kitten or a puppy. This baby, however--Joseph his name was, and he was
always so referred to--was different. He spent a great deal of time
alone, sitting erect in his white iron crib. In spite of the conditions
of his birth, he was calm, pink-cheeked and healthy. The first day that
Lydia was up she glanced at him as she passed the door. He gave her
somehow the impression of leading a life apart. At first she only used
to stare at him from the doorway; then she ventured in, leaned on the
crib, offered him a finger to which he clung, invented a game of
clapping of hands, and was rewarded by a toothless smile and a long
complicated gurgle of delight.
The sound was too much for Lydia--the idea that the baby was glad to be
starting out on the tortured adventure of living. She went back to her
own room in tears, weeping not for her own griefs but because all human
beings were so infinitely pathetic.
The next day, Anna, the mother, came in while she was bending over the
crib. Lydia knew her story, the common one--the story of a respectable,
sheltered girl falling suddenly, wildly in love with a handsome boy, and
finding, when after a few months he wearied of her, that she had never
been his wife--that he was already married.
Lydia looked at the neat, blond, spectacled woman beside her. It was
hard to imagine her murdering anyone. She seemed gentle, vague, perhaps
a little defective. Later in their acquaintance she told Lydia how she
had done it. She had not minded his perfidy so much, until he told her
that she had known all along they weren't married--that she'd done it
with her eyes open--that she had been "out for a good time." He was a
paperhanger among other things, and a great pair of shears had been
lying on the table. The first thing she knew they were buried in his
side.
Lydia could not resist asking her whether she regretted what she had
done.
The girl considered. "I think it was right for him to die," she said,
but she was sorry about Joseph. In a little while the baby would be
taken from her and put into a state institution. She was
maternal--primitively maternal--and her real punishment was not
imprisonment but separation from her child. Lydia saw this without
entirely understanding it.
The girl had said to her: "I suppose you can't imagine killing anyone?"
Lydia assured her that she could--oh, very easily. She went back to her
room thinking that she was more a murderess at heart than this girl, who
was now nothing but a mother.
When she came out of the hospital she was not put back at the schoolroom
work but was sent to the kitchen. This was an immense tiled room which
gave the impression to those who first entered it of being entirely
empty. Then the eye fell on a row of copper containers--three of them as
tall as she--one for tea, one for coffee, one for hot water, and three
smaller pots, round like witches' caldrons, for the cooking of cereals
and meats and potatoes. The baking was done in an adjacent alcove. There
Lydia was put to work. Gradually the process began to interest her--the
mixing of the dough and the baking of dozens of loaves at a time in a
great oven with rotating shelves in it. The oven, like all ovens, had
its caprices, dependent upon the amount of heat being used by the rest
of the institution. Lydia set herself to master the subject. A certain
strain of practical competence in her had never before had its
expression.