AFTER being dead twenty years, he walked out into the sunshine.
It was as if the bones of a bleached skeleton should join themselves on
some forgotten plain, and look about them for the vanished flesh.
To be dead it is not necessary to be in the grave. There are places
where the worms creep about the heart instead of the body.
The penitentiary is one of these. David Culross had been in the
penitentiary twenty years. Now, with that worm-eaten heart, he came out
into liberty and looked about him for the habiliments with which he had
formerly clothed himself,--for hope, self-respect, courage, pugnacity,
and industry.
But they had vanished and left no trace, like the flesh of the dead men
on the plains, and so, morally unapparelled, in the hideous skeleton of
his manhood, he walked on down the street under the mid-June sunshine.
You can understand, can you not, how a skeleton might wish to get back
into its comfortable grave? David Culross had not walked two blocks
before he was seized with an almost uncontrollable desire to beg to be
shielded once more in that safe and shameful retreat from which he had
just been released. A horrible perception of the largeness of the world
swept over him. Space and eternity could seem no larger to the usual man
than earth--that snug and insignificant planet--looked to David Culross.
“If I go back,” he cried, despairingly, looking up to the great building
that arose above the stony hills, “they will not take me in.” He was
absolutely without a refuge, utterly without a destination; he did not
have a hope. There was nothing he desired except the surrounding of
those four narrow walls between which he had lain at night and dreamed
those ever-recurring dreams,-dreams which were never prophecies or
promises, but always the hackneyed history of what he had sacrificed by
his crime, and relinquished by his pride.
The men who passed him looked at him with mingled amusement and pity.
They knew the “prison look,” and they knew the prison clothes. For
though the State gives to its discharged convicts clothes which are
like those of other men, it makes a hundred suits from the same sort of
cloth. The police know the fabric, and even the citizens recognize
it. But, then, were each man dressed in different garb he could not be
disguised. Every one knows in what dull school that sidelong glance is
learned, that aimless drooping of the shoulders, that rhythmic lifting
of the heavy foot.
David Culross wondered if his will were dead. He put it to the test.
He lifted up his head to a position which it had not held for many
miserable years. He put his hands in his pockets in a pitiful attempt at
nonchalance, and walked down the street with a step which was meant to
be brisk, but which was in fact only uncertain. In his pocket were ten
dollars. This much the State equips a man with when it sends him out of
its penal halls. It gives him also transportation to any point within
reasonable distance that he may desire to reach. Culross had requested a
ticket to Chicago. He naturally said Chicago. In the long colorless days
it had been in Chicago that all those endlessly repeated scenes had been
laid. Walking up the street now with that wavering ineffectual gait,
these scenes came back to surge in his brain like waters ceaselessly
tossed in a wind-swept basin.
There was the office, bare and clean, where the young stoop-shouldered
clerks sat writing. In their faces was a strange resemblance, just as
there was in the backs of the ledgers, and in the endless bills on
the spindles. If one of them laughed, it was not with gayety, but with
gratification at the discomfiture of another. None of them ate well.
None of them were rested after sleep. All of them rode on the stuffy
one-horse cars to and from their work. Sundays they lay in bed very
late, and ate more dinner than they could digest. There was a certain
fellowship among them,--such fellowship as a band of captives among
cannibals might feel, each of them waiting with vital curiosity to
see who was the next to be eaten. But of that fellowship that plans
in unison, suffers in sympathy, enjoys vicariously, strengthens into
friendship and communion of soul they knew nothing. Indeed, such
camaraderie would have been disapproved of by the Head Clerk. He would
have looked on an emotion with exactly the same displeasure that he
would on an error in the footing of the year's accounts. It was tacitly
understood that one reached the proud position of Head Clerk by having
no emotions whatever.
Culross did not remember having been born with a pen in his hand, or
even with one behind his ear; but certainly from the day he had been
let out of knickerbockers his constant companion had been that greatly
overestimated article. His father dying at a time that cut short David's
school-days, he went out armed with his new knowledge of double-entry,
determined to make a fortune and a commercial name. Meantime, he lived
in a suite of three rooms on West Madison Street with his mother, who
was a good woman, and lived where she did that she might be near her
favorite meeting-house. She prayed, and cooked bad dinners, principally
composed of dispiriting pastry. Her idea of house-keeping was to keep
the shades down, whatever happened; and when David left home in the
evening for any purpose of pleasure, she wept. David persuaded himself
that he despised amusement, and went to bed each night at half-past nine
in a folding bedstead in the front room, and, by becoming absolutely
stolid from mere vegetation, imagined that he was almost fit to be a
Head Clerk.
Walking down the street now after the twenty years, thinking of these
dead but innocent days, this was the picture he saw; and as he reflected
upon it, even the despoiled and desolate years just passed seemed richer
by contrast.
He reached the station thus dreaming, and found, as he had been told
when the warden bade him good-by, that a train was to be at hand
directly bound to the city. A few moments later he was on that train.
Well back in the shadow, and out of sight of the other passengers, he
gave himself up to the enjoyment of the comfortable cushion. He would
willingly have looked from the window,--green fields were new and
wonderful; drifting clouds a marvel; men, houses, horses, farms, all a
revelation,--but those haunting visions were at him again, and would not
leave brain or eye free for other things.
But the next scene had warmer tints. It was the interior of a rich
room,--crimson and amber fabrics, flowers, the gleam of a statue beyond
the drapings; the sound of a tender piano unflinging a familiar melody,
and a woman. She was just a part of all the luxury.
He himself, very timid and conscious of his awkwardness, sat near,
trying barrenly to get some of his thoughts out of his brain on to his
tongue.
“Strange, isn't it,” the woman broke in on her own music, “that we
have seen each other so very often and never spoken? I've often thought
introductions were ridiculous. Fancy seeing a person year in and year
out, and really knowing all about him, and being perfectly acquainted
with his name--at least his or her name, you know--and then never
speaking! Some one comes along, and says, 'Miss Le Baron, this is Mr.
Culross,' just as if one didn't know that all the time! And there you
are! You cease to be dumb folks, and fall to talking, and say a lot of
things neither of you care about, and after five or six weeks of time
and sundry meetings, get down to honestly saying what you mean. I'm so
glad we've got through with that first stage, and can say what we think
and tell what we really like.”
Then the playing began again,--a harplike intermingling of soft sounds.
Zoe Le Baron's hands were very girlish. Everything about her was
unformed. Even her mind was so. But all promised a full completion.
The voice, the shoulders, the smile, the words, the lips, the arms, the
whole mind and body, were rounding to maturity.
“Why do you never come to church in the morning?” asks Miss Le Baron,
wheeling around on her piano-stool suddenly. “You are only there at
night, with your mother.”
“I go only on her account,” replies David, truthfully. “In the morning
I am so tired with the week's work that I rest at home. I ought to go, I
know.”
“Yes, you ought,” returns the young woman, gravely. “It doesn't really
rest one to lie in bed like that. I've tried it at boarding-school. It
was no good whatever.”
“Should you advise me,” asks David, in a confiding tone, “to arise early
on Sunday?”
The girl blushes a little. “By all means!” she cries, her eyes
twinkling, “and--and come to church. Our morning sermons are really very
much better than those in the evening.” And she plays a waltz, and what
with the music and the warmth of the room and the perfume of the roses,
a something nameless and mystical steals over the poor clerk, and
swathes him about like the fumes of opium. They are alone. The silence
is made deeper by that rhythmic unswelling of sound. As the painter
flushes the bare wall into splendor, these emotions illuminated his
soul, and gave to it that high courage that comes when men or women
suddenly realize that each life has its significance,-their own lives no
less than the lives of others.
The man sitting there in the shadow in that noisy train saw in his
vision how the lad arose and moved, like one under a spell, toward the
piano. He felt again the enchantment of the music-ridden quiet, of the
perfume, and the presence of the woman.
“Knowing you and speaking with you have not made much difference with
me,” he whispers, drunk on the new wine of passion, “for I have loved
you since I saw you first. And though it is so sweet to hear you speak,
your voice is no more beautiful than I thought it would be. I have loved
you a long time, and I want to know--”
The broken man in the shadow remembered how the lad stopped, astonished
at his boldness and his fluency, overcome suddenly at the thought of
what he was saying. The music stopped with a discord. The girl arose,
trembling and scarlet.
“I would not have believed it of you,” she cries, “to take advantage of
me like this, when I am alone--and--everything. You know very well that
nothing but trouble could come to either of us from your telling me a
thing like that.”
He puts his hands up to his face to keep off her anger. He is trembling
with confusion.
Then she broke in penitently, trying to pull his hands away from his
hot face: “Never mind! I know you didn't mean anything. Be good, do, and
don't spoil the lovely times we have together. You know very well
father and mother wouldn't let us see each other at all if they--if they
thought you were saying anything such as you said just now.”
“Oh, but I can't help it!” cries the boy, despairingly. “I have never
loved anybody at all till now. I don't mean not another girl, you know.
But you are the first being I ever cared for. I sometimes think mother
cares for me because I pay the rent. And the office--you can't imagine
what that is like. The men in it are moving corpses. They're proud to be
that way, and so was I till I knew you and learned what life was like.
All the happy moments I have had have been here. Now, if you tell me
that we are not to care for each other--”
There was some one coming down the hall. The curtain lifted. A
middle-aged man stood there looking at him.
“Culross,” said he, “I'm disappointed in you. I didn't mean to listen,
but I couldn't help hearing what you said just now. I don't blame you
particularly. Young men will be fools. And I do not in any way mean to
insult you when I tell you to stop your coming here. I don't want to see
you inside this door again, and after a while you will thank me for
it. You have taken a very unfair advantage of my invitation. I make
allowances for your youth.”
He held back the curtain for the lad to pass out. David threw a
miserable glance at the girl. She was standing looking at her father
with an expression that David could not fathom. He went into the hall,
picked up his hat, and walked out in silence.
David wondered that night, walking the chilly streets after he
quitted the house, and often, often afterward, if that comfortable and
prosperous gentleman, safe beyond the perturbations of youth, had
any idea of what he had done. How COULD he know anything of the black
monotony of the life of the man he turned from his door? The “desk's
dead wood” and all its hateful slavery, the dull darkened rooms where
his mother prosed through endless evenings, the bookless, joyless,
hopeless existence that had cramped him all his days rose up before
him, as a stretch of unbroken plain may rise before a lost man till it
maddens him.
The bowed man in the car-seat remembered with a flush of reminiscent
misery how the lad turned suddenly in his walk and entered the door of
a drinking-room that stood open. It was very comfortable within. The
screens kept out the chill of the autumn night, the sawdust-sprinkled
floor was clean, the tables placed near together, the bar glittering,
the attendants white-aproned and brisk.
David liked the place, and he liked better still the laughter that came
from a room within. It had a note in it a little different from anything
he had ever heard before in his life, and one that echoed his mood. He
ventured to ask if he might go into the farther room.
It does not mean much when most young men go to a place like this. They
take their bit of unwholesome dissipation quietly enough, and are a
little coarser and more careless each time they indulge in it, perhaps.
But certainly their acts, whatever gradual deterioration they may
indicate, bespeak no sudden moral revolution. With this young clerk it
was different. He was a worse man from the moment he entered the door,
for he did violence to his principles; he killed his self-respect.
He had been paid at the office that night, and he had the money--a
week's miserable pittance--in his pocket. His every action revealed the
fact that he was a novice in recklessness. His innocent face piqued the
men within. They gave him a welcome that amazed him. Of course the rest
of the evening was a chaos to him. The throat down which he poured the
liquor was as tender as a child's. The men turned his head with
their ironical compliments. Their boisterous good-fellowship was as
intoxicating to this poor young recluse as the liquor.
It was the revulsion from this feeling, when he came to a consciousness
that the men were laughing at him and not with him, that wrecked his
life. He had gone from beer to whiskey, and from whiskey to brandy, by
this time, at the suggestion of the men, and was making awkward lunges
with a billiard cue, spurred on by the mocking applause of the others.
One young fellow was particularly hilarious at his expense. His jokes
became insults, or so they seemed to David.
A quarrel followed, half a jest on the part of the other, all serious
as far as David was concerned. And then--Well, who could tell how it
happened? The billiard cue was in David's hand, and the skull of the
jester was split, a horrible gaping thing, revoltingly animal.
David never saw his home again. His mother gave it out in church that
her heart was broken, and she wrote a letter to David begging him to
reform. She said she would never cease to pray for him, that he might
return to grace. He had an attorney, an impecunious and very aged
gentleman, whose life was a venerable failure, and who talked so much
about his personal inconveniences from indigestion that he forgot to
take a very keen interest in the concerns of his client. David's trial
made no sensation. He did not even have the cheap sympathy of the
morbid. The court-room was almost empty the dull spring day when the
east wind beat against the window, jangling the loose panes all through
the reading of the verdict.
Twenty years!
Twenty years in the penitentiary!
David looked up at the judge and smiled. Men have been known to smile
that way when the car-wheel crashes over their legs, or a bullet lets
the air through their lungs.
All that followed would have seemed more terrible if it had not appeared
to be so remote. David had to assure himself over and over that it was
really he who was put in that disgraceful dress, and locked in that
shameful walk from corridor to workroom, from work-room to chapel.
The work was not much more monotonous than that to which he had been
accustomed in the office. Here, as there, one was reproved for not doing
the required amount, but never praised for extraordinary efforts. Here,
as there, the workers regarded each other with dislike and suspicion.
Here, as there, work was a penalty and not a pleasure.
It is the nights that are to be dreaded in a penitentiary. Speech eases
the brain of free men; but the man condemned to eternal silence is
bound to endure torments. Thought, which might be a diversion, becomes
a curse; it is a painful disease which becomes chronic. It does not take
long to forget the days of the week and the months of the year when
time brings no variance. David drugged himself on dreams. He knew it was
weakness, but it was the wine of forgetfulness, and he indulged in it.
He went over and over, in endless repetition, every scene in which Zoe
Le Baron had figured.
He learned by a paper that she had gone to Europe. He was glad of that.
For there were hours in which he imagined that his fate might have
caused her distress--not much, of course, but perhaps an occasional hour
of sympathetic regret. But it was pleasanter not to think of that. He
preferred to remember the hours they had spent together while she was
teaching him the joy of life.
How lovely her gray eyes were! Deep, yet bright, and full of silent
little speeches. The rooms in which he imagined her as moving were
always splendid; the gowns she wore were of rustling silk. He never in
any dream, waking or sleeping, associated her with poverty or sorrow or
pain. Gay and beautiful, she moved from city to city, in these visions
of David's, looking always at wonderful things, and finding laughter in
every happening.
It was six months after his entrance into his silent abode that a letter
came for him.
“By rights, Culross,” said the warden, “I should not give this letter
to you. It isn't the sort we approve of. But you're in for a good spell,
and if there is anything that can make life seem more tolerable, I don't
know but you're entitled to it. At least, I'm not the man to deny it to
you.”