XXV
The first and the last week seem longest in the term of imprisonment. During the rest of the time the hours pass in swift succession, as the work and the regular hours help to shorten the time; there is a spirit of patience, and the mind becomes more and more introspective and philosophical.
But in the last week all the thoughts, the plans, the ambitions, the discoveries of a new future, seem to be concentrated. The minutes drag by with a laborious and torpid slowness, and there is an intensity of time which seems to crowd sixty hours into one single hour by the clock. The ordinary patient, often of a cheerful habit of mind, is of a sudden transformed into a cranky, impatient, unruly, violent attitude.
During that last week I very nearly got into trouble, for the first time in my ten months of imprisonment "with good behaviour;" and this when an impertinent answer might have kept me two months longer within this barred prison.
A keeper known and hated for his brutal and insulting attitude towards the prisoners was relieving our own hospital keeper during the lunch hour. He was watching the prisoners file into the room at the opposite end of the hospital to wait for the arrival of the dentist. A belated man came in holding a handkerchief close to his mouth as if he were suffering from an agonizing toothache.
The keeper spoke: "Who is that dirty bum?"
"What do you mean?" I said.
"I mean who is that dirty bum who just came in?" he repeated.
"I don't understand you," I rejoined, angry at his remark.
"I see you're rather particular about expressions," he said in a surprised tone.
"Yes," I retorted, "and I don't see what right you have to call an inoffensive convict a dirty bum, when if it wasn't for us dirty bums you wouldn't be sitting here now."
The situation was saved by an old Irish keeper who added laughingly, "That's right, you wouldn't be getting twenty-five per a week to keep a chair from flying out of a window, if it wasn't for those dirty bums."