I
It was a dark autumn night. The old banker was pacing from corner to
corner of his study, recalling to his mind the party he gave in the
autumn fifteen years ago. There were many clever people at the party
and much interesting conversation. They talked among other things of
capital punishment. The guests, among them not a few scholars and
journalists, for the most part disapproved of capital punishment. They
found it obsolete as a means of punishment, unfitted to a Christian
State and immoral. Some of them thought that capital punishment should
be replaced universally by life-imprisonment.
“I don’t agree with you,” said the host. “I myself have experienced
neither capital punishment nor life-imprisonment, but if one may
judge _a priori,_ then in my opinion capital punishment is more
moral and more humane than imprisonment. Execution kills instantly,
life-imprisonment kills by degrees. Who is the more humane executioner,
one who kills you in a few seconds or one who draws the life out of
you incessantly, for years?”
“They’re both equally immoral,” remarked one of the guests, “because
their purpose is the same, to take away life. The State is not God. It
has no right to take away that which it cannot give back, if it should
so desire.”
Among the company was a lawyer, a young man of about twenty-five. On
being asked his opinion, he said:
“Capital punishment and life-imprisonment are equally immoral; but if
I were offered the choice between them, I would certainly choose the
second. It’s better to live somehow than not to live at all.”
There ensued a lively discussion. The banker who was then younger and
more nervous suddenly lost his temper, banged his fist on the table, and
turning to the young lawyer, cried out:
“It’s a lie. I bet you two millions you wouldn’t stick in a cell even
for five years.”
“If that’s serious,” replied the lawyer, “then I bet I’ll stay not five
but fifteen.”
“Fifteen! Done!” cried the banker. “Gentlemen, I stake two millions.”
“Agreed. You stake two millions, I my freedom,” said the lawyer.
So this wild, ridiculous bet came to pass. The banker, who at that time
had too many millions to count, spoiled and capricious, was beside
himself with rapture. During supper he said to the lawyer jokingly:
“Come to your senses, young man, before it’s too late. Two millions are
nothing to me, but you stand to lose three or four of the best years of
your life. I say three or four, because you’ll never stick it out any
longer. Don’t forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary is much
heavier than enforced imprisonment. The idea that you have the right to
free yourself at any moment will poison the whole of your life in the
cell. I pity you.”
And now the banker pacing from corner to corner, recalled all this and
asked himself:
“Why did I make this bet? What’s the good? The lawyer loses fifteen
years of his life and I throw away two millions. Will it convince
people that capital punishment is worse or better than imprisonment for
life. No, No! all stuff and rubbish. On my part, it was the caprice of
a well-fed man; on the lawyer’s, pure greed of gold.”
He recollected further what happened after the evening party. It
was decided that the lawyer must undergo his imprisonment under the
strictest observation, in a garden-wing of the banker’s house. It was
agreed that during the period he would be deprived of the right to
cross the threshold, to see living people, to hear human voices, and
to receive letters and newspapers. He was permitted to have a musical
instrument, to read books, to write letters, to drink wine and smoke
tobacco. By the agreement he could communicate, but only in silence,
with the outside world through a little window specially constructed
for this purpose. Everything necessary, books, music, wine, he could
receive in any quantity by sending a note through the window. The
agreement provided for all the minutest details, which made the
confinement strictly solitary, and it obliged the lawyer to remain
exactly fifteen years from twelve o’clock of November 14th 1870 to
twelve o’clock of November 14th 1885. The least attempt on his part to
violate the conditions, to escape if only for two minutes before the
time freed the banker from the obligation to pay him the two millions.
During the first year of imprisonment, the lawyer, as far as it
was possible to judge from his short notes, suffered terribly from
loneliness and boredom. From his wing day and night came the sound of
the piano. He rejected wine and tobacco. “Wine,” he wrote, “excites
desires, and desires are the chief foes of a prisoner; besides, nothing
is more boring than to drink good wine alone,” and tobacco spoils the
air in his room. During the first year the lawyer was sent books of a
light character; novels with a complicated love interest, stories of
crime and fantasy, comedies, and so on.
In the second year the piano was heard no longer and the lawyer asked
only for classics. In the fifth year, music was heard again, and the
prisoner asked for wine. Those who watched him said that during the
whole of that year he was only eating, drinking, and lying on his bed.
He yawned often and talked angrily to himself. Books he did not read.
Sometimes at nights he would sit down to write. He would write for a
long time and tear it all up in the morning. More than once he was
heard to weep.
In the second half of the sixth year, the prisoner began zealously to
study languages, philosophy, and history. He fell on these subjects so
hungrily that the banker hardly had time to get books enough for him.
In the space of four years about six hundred volumes were bought at
his request. It was while that passion lasted that the banker received
the following letter from the prisoner: “My dear gaoler, I am writing
these lines in six languages. Show them to experts. Let them read them.
If they do not find one single mistake, I beg you to give orders to
have a gun fired off in the garden. By the noise I shall know that my
efforts have not been in vain. The geniuses of all ages and countries
speak in different languages; but in them all burns the same flame. Oh,
if you knew my heavenly happiness now that I can understand them!” The
prisoner’s desire was fulfilled. Two shots were fired in the garden by
the banker’s order.
Later on, after the tenth year, the lawyer sat immovable before his
table and read only the New Testament. The banker found it strange
that a man who in four years had mastered six hundred erudite volumes,
should have spent nearly a year in reading one book, easy to
understand and by no means thick. The New Testament was then replaced
by the history of religions and theology.
During the last two years of his confinement the prisoner read an
extraordinary amount, quite haphazard. Now he would apply himself to
the natural sciences, then would read Byron or Shakespeare. Notes used
to come from him in which he asked to be sent at the same time a book
on chemistry, a text-book of medicine, a novel, and some treatise on
philosophy or theology. He read as though he were swimming in the sea
among the broken pieces of wreckage, and in his desire to save his life
was eagerly grasping one piece after another.