With my unexpected appointment as doctor to D---- gaol, I seemed to
have put on the seven-league boots of success. No doubt it was an
extraordinary degree of good fortune, even to one who had looked forward
with a broad view of confidence; yet, I think, perhaps on account of the
very casual nature of my promotion, I never took the post entirely
seriously.
At the same time I was fully bent on justifying my little cockney
patron's choice by a resolute subscription to his theories of prison
management.
Major James Shrike inspired me with a curious conceit of impertinent
respect. In person the very embodiment of that insignificant vulgarity,
without extenuating circumstances, which is the type in caricature of the
ultimate cockney, he possessed a force of mind and an earnestness of
purpose that absolutely redeemed him on close acquaintanceship. I found
him all he had stated himself to be, and something more.
He had a noble object always in view--the employment of sane and
humanitarian methods in the treatment of redeemable criminals, and he
strove towards it with completely untiring devotion. He was of those who
never insist beyond the limits of their own understanding, clear-sighted
in discipline, frank in relaxation, an altruist in the larger sense.
His undaunted persistence, as I learned, received ample illustration some
few years prior to my acquaintance with him, when--his system being
experimental rather than mature--a devastating endemic of typhoid in the
prison had for the time stultified his efforts. He stuck to his post; but
so virulent was the outbreak that the prison commissioners judged a
complete evacuation of the building and overhauling of the drainage to
be necessary. As a consequence, for some eighteen months--during thirteen
of which the Governor and his household remained sole inmates of the
solitary pile (so sluggishly do we redeem our condemned social
bog-lands)--the "system" stood still for lack of material to mould. At
the end of over a year of stagnation, a contract was accepted and
workmen put in, and another five months saw the prison reordered for
practical purposes.
The interval of forced inactivity must have sorely tried the patience of
the Governor. Practical theorists condemned to rust too often eat out
their own hearts. Major Shrike never referred to this period, and,
indeed, laboriously snubbed any allusion to it.
He was, I have a shrewd notion, something of an officially petted
reformer. Anyhow, to his abolition of the insensate barbarism of crank
and treadmill in favour of civilizing methods no opposition was offered.
Solitary confinement--a punishment outside all nature to a gregarious
race--found no advocate in him. "A man's own suffering mind," he argued,
"must be, of all moral food, the most poisonous for him to feed on.
Surround a scorpion with fire and he stings himself to death, they say.
Throw a diseased soul entirely upon its own resources and moral suicide
results."
To sum up: his nature embodied humanity without sentimentalism, firmness
without obstinacy, individuality without selfishness; his activity was
boundless, his devotion to his system so real as to admit no utilitarian
sophistries into his scheme of personal benevolence. Before I had been
with him a week, I respected him as I had never respected man before.
* * * * *
One evening (it was during the second month of my appointment) we were
sitting in his private study--a dark, comfortable room lined with books.
It was an occasion on which a new characteristic of the man was offered
to my inspection.
A prisoner of a somewhat unusual type had come in that day--a
spiritualistic medium, convicted of imposture. To this person I casually
referred.
"May I ask how you propose dealing with the new-comer?"
"On the familiar lines."
"But, surely--here we have a man of superior education, of imagination
even?"
"No, no, no! A hawker's opportuneness; that describes it. These fellows
would make death itself a vulgarity."
"You've no faith in their--"
"Not a tittle. Heaven forfend! A sheet and a turnip are poetry to their
manifestations. It's as crude and sour soil for us to work on as any I
know. We'll cart it wholesale."
"I take you--excuse my saying so--for a supremely sceptical man."
"As to what?"
"The supernatural."
There was no answer during a considerable interval. Presently it came,
with deliberate insistence:--
"It is a principle with me to oppose bullying. We are here for a definite
purpose--his duty plain to any man who wills to read it. There may be
disembodied spirits who seek to distress or annoy where they can no
longer control. If there are, mine, which is not yet divorced from its
means to material action, declines to be influenced by any irresponsible
whimsey, emanating from a place whose denizens appear to be actuated by a
mere frivolous antagonism to all human order and progress."
"But supposing you, a murderer, to be haunted by the presentment of your
victim?"
"I will imagine that to be my case. Well, it makes no difference. My
interest is with the great human system, in one of whose veins I am a
circulating drop. It is my business to help to keep the system sound,
to do my duty without fear or favour. If disease--say a fouled
conscience--contaminates me, it is for me to throw off the incubus,
not accept it, and transmit the poison. Whatever my lapses of nature, I
owe it to the entire system to work for purity in my allotted sphere, and
not to allow any microbe bugbear to ride me roughshod, to the detriment
of my fellow drops."