III
The resting day without reading or occupation or exercise of any sort is agonizing; intolerable in the extreme.
From four o'clock on Saturday afternoon until Monday morning at eight, except for the short freedom for meals, we are locked up in our cells. There is no exercise, no work, for almost forty hours. Most of the cases of insanity in prison are due to this enforced inaction, and the accumulation of foul air in the cells. Even the keepers who have to inspect the top tiers run swiftly along the galleries with their noses closed tight.
Hoping to break up this dreadful monotony, I attend the Catholic mass in the morning and the Protestant service in the afternoon. The one delightful and exquisite balm to our jaded minds is the music of the organs, which accompanies the singing of hymns by convicts.
The chapel on the second floor is crowded with prisoners; and on one side there are a few women, with large poke bonnets covering their faces to prevent their flirting with the men.
A convict informs me that I would have been punished "against the wall" if I had been caught going to the two services. At the slightest infraction of the rules, I learn, the offender is dragged towards the main prison and kept standing, facing the wall, sometimes all day without food or water—and there is no way of finding out what and how many rules there are.
On week days the warden stops to inquire and punishes according to the state of his mind or his stomach, or perhaps the weather.
The dinner consists of a soup of beans, carrots, lentils or potatoes; meat with vegetables, or cornbeef and cabbage; and "bootleg." For supper there is unsweetened tea, bologna sausage or red gelatine with bread.
The anticipation of another night like the last one fills my mind with uneasiness and dread and fright. The memory of it is burned forever into my consciousness. But fortunately it was not so full of terror. It was bad; but no other night ever could be as horrible as the first night I spent in that place.