These Twain Part 49

When the reverberation of the words had ceased, a little silence ensued.

The ear listened vainly for the slightest sound. In the silence the implacability of granite walls and iron reticulations reigned over the accursed vision, stultifying the soul.

"Are these cells occupied?" asked Alicia timidly.

"Not yet, Mrs. Hesketh. It's too soon. A few are."

Hilda thought:

"He may be here,--behind one of those doors." Her heart was liquid with compa.s.sion and revolt. "No," she a.s.sured herself. "They must have taken him away already. It's impossible he should be here. He's innocent."

"Perhaps you would like to see one of the cells?" the official suggested.

A warder appeared, and, with the inescapable jangle of keys, opened a door. The party entered the cell, ladies first, then the official and his new acquaintances; then Edwin, trailing. The cell was long and narrow, fairly lofty, bluish-white colour, very dimly lighted by a tiny grimed window high up in a wall of extreme thickness. The bed lay next the long wall; except the bed, a stool, a shelf, and some utensils, there was nothing to furnish the horrible nakedness of the cell. One of the visitors picked up an old book from the shelf. It was a Greek Testament. The party seemed astonished at this evidence of culture among prisoners, of the height from which a criminal may have fallen.

The official smiled.

"They often ask for such things on purpose," said he. "They think it's effective. They're very nave, you know, at bottom."

"This very cell may be his cell," thought Hilda. "He may have been here all these months, years, knowing he was innocent. He may have thought about me in this cell." She glanced cautiously at Edwin, but Edwin would not catch her eye.

They left. On the way to the workshops, they had a glimpse of the old parts of the prison, used during the Napoleonic wars, incredibly dark, frowsy, like catacombs.

"We don't use this part--unless we're very full up," said the official, and he contrasted it with the bright, s.p.a.cious, healthy excellences of the hall which they had just quitted, to prove that civilisation never stood still.

And then suddenly, at the end of a pa.s.sage, a door opened and they were in the tailors' shop, a large irregular apartment full of a strong stench and of squatted and grotesque human beings. The human beings, for the most part, were clothed in a peculiar brown stuff, covered with broad arrows. The dress consisted of a short jacket, baggy knickerbockers, black stockings, and coloured shoes. Their hair was cut so short that they had the appearance of being bald, and their great ears protruded at a startling angle from the sides of those smooth heads. They were of every age, yet they all looked alike, ridiculous, pantomimic, appalling. Some gazed with indifference at the visitors; others seemed oblivious of the entry. They all st.i.tched on their haunches, in the stench, under the surveillance of eight armed warders in blue.

"How many?" asked the official mechanically.

"Forty-nine, sir," said a warder.

And Hilda searched their loathsome and vapid faces for the face of George Cannon. He was not there. She trembled,--whether with relief or with disappointment she knew not. She was agonised, but in her torture she exulted that she had come.

No comment had been made in the workshop, the official having hinted that silence was usual on such occasions. But in a kind of antechamber--one of those amorphous s.p.a.ces, serving no purpose and resembling nothing, which are sometimes to be found between definable rooms and corridors in a vast building imperfectly planned--the party halted in the midst of a discussion as to discipline. The male visitors, except Edwin, showed marked intelligence and detachment; they seemed to understand immediately how it was that forty-nine ruffians could be trusted to squat on their thighs and st.i.tch industriously and use scissors and other weapons for hours without being chained to the ground; they certainly knew something of the handling of men. The official, triumphant, stated that every prisoner had the right of personal appeal to the Governor every day.

"They come with their stories of grievances," said he, tolerant and derisive.

"Which often aren't true?"

"Which are never true," said the official quietly. "Never! They are always lies--always! ... Shows the material we have to deal with!" He gave a short laugh.

"Really!" said one of the men, rather pleased and excited by this report of universal lying.

"I suppose," Edwin blurted out, "you can tell for certain when they aren't speaking the truth?"

Everybody looked at him surprised, as though the dumb had spoken. The official's glance showed some suspicion of sarcasm and a tendency to resent it.

"We can," he answered shortly, commanding his features to a faint smile.

"And now I wonder what Mrs. Rotherwas will be saying if I don't restore you to her." It was agreed that regard must be had for Mrs. Rotherwas's hospitable arrangements, though the prison was really very interesting and would repay study.

They entered a wide corridor--one of two that met at right-angles in the amorphous s.p.a.ce--leading in the direction of the chief entrance. From the end of this corridor a file of convicts was approaching in charge of two warders with guns. The official offered no remark, but held on.

Hilda, falling back near to Edwin in the procession, was divided between a dreadful fear and a hope equally dreadful. Except in the tailors'

shop, these were the only prisoners they had seen, and they appeared out of place in the half-freedom of the corridor; for n.o.body could conceive a prisoner save in a cell or shop, and these were moving in a public corridor, unshackled.

Then she distinguished George Cannon among them. He was the third from the last. She knew him by his nose and the shape of his chin, and by his walk, though there was little left of his proud walk in the desolating, hopeless prison-shuffle which was the gait of all six convicts. His hair was iron-grey. All these details she could see and be sure of in the distance of the dim corridor. She no longer had a stomach; it had gone, and yet she felt a horrible nausea.

She cried out to herself:

"Why did I come? Why did I come? I am always doing these mad things.

Edwin was right. Why do I not listen to him?"

The party of visitors led by the high official, and the file of convicts in charge of armed warders, were gradually approaching one another in the wide corridor. It seemed to Hilda that a fearful collision was imminent, and that something ought to be done. But n.o.body among the visitors did anything or seemed to be disturbed. Only they had all fallen silent; and in the echoing corridor could be heard the firm steps of the male visitors accompanying the delicate tripping of the women, and the military tramp of the warders with the confused shuffling of the convicts.

"Has he recognised me?" thought Hilda, wildly.

She hoped that he had and that he had not. She recalled with the most poignant sorrow the few days of their union, their hours of intimacy, his kisses, her secret realisation of her power over him, and of his pa.s.sion. She wanted to scream:

"That man there is as innocent as any of you, and soon the whole world will know it! He never committed any crime except that of loving me too much. He could not do without me, and so I was his ruin. It is horrible that he should be here in this h.e.l.l. He must be set free at once. The Home Secretary knows he is innocent, but they are so slow. How can anyone bear that he should stop here one instant longer?"

But she made no sound. The tremendous force of an ancient and organised society kept her lips closed and her feet in a line with the others.

She thought in despair:

"We are getting nearer, and I cannot meet him. I shall drop." She glanced at Edwin, as if for help, but Edwin was looking straight ahead.

Then a warder, stopping, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed with the harsh brevity of a drill-serjeant:

"Halt!"

The file halted.

"Right turn!"

The six captives turned, with their faces close against the wall of the corridor, obedient, humiliated, spiritless, limp, stooping. Their backs presented the most ridiculous aspect; all the calculated grotesquerie of the surpa.s.singly ugly prison uniform was accentuated as they stood thus, a row of living scarecrows, who knew that they had not the right even to look upon free men. Every one of them except George Cannon had large protuberant ears that completed the monstrosity of their appearance.

The official gave his new acquaintances a satisfied glance, as if saying:

"That is the rule by which we manage these chance encounters."

The visitors went by in silence, instinctively edging away from the captives. And as she pa.s.sed, Hilda lurched very heavily against Edwin, and recovered herself. Edwin seized her arm near the shoulder, and saw that she was pale. The others were in front.

Behind them they could hear the warder:

"Left turn! March!"

And the shuffling and the tramping recommenced.

IV