CHAPTER XX
THE SHADOW OF THE SCAFFOLD
It was my harassing duty to act as death-watch to the man who wrote the appended diary. On the day before his execution he made no entry, although he opened the book several times and once asked me to sharpen his pencil. I was not present at his execution, but was informed that he bore himself with dignity and calmness. The crime which he expiated with his life was the murder of his wife who had left him to live with another man. He had still one year to complete before obtaining his degree as a medical practitioner. At his trial, he refused to take refuge behind his wife's misdemeanour, nor would he permit his counsel to urge this plea on his behalf.
I have held this unique diary for over a year, not feeling at liberty to give it to the public while in 'the service of the Mounted Police.—E. F. M.
There are yet six days till I die.
The words the judge said were "hanged by the neck till dead." Ever since, they have haunted me like a song that fastens itself on one and will not be forgotten. The words drag out their ghastly length to the sound of the Fort bell as it rings the hours. They drawl to the tread of the sentinel who walks back and forth outside my cell—hanged—by—the—neck—till—dead.
Does it take a man long to hang? I inquired of my guard, and although we are not supposed to talk, he laughed nervously and said he had once read of a doctor who cut down to a murderer's heart three minutes after the drop fell. There was still enough force in the heart to ring an electric bell.
Five days more!
They are a tireless breed, the red-police of Canada, and they have an eye in the centre of their foreheads that never sleeps. I once heard there was such an eye, but I forget about it.
This boy who watches me is nearly my own age, and I can see he is sorry for me. I will not whimper and wince, but will hedge myself about with a fence of laughter and bravado. It is the last kindness I can do to any one.
I like him better than the priest who visits me. I look at the priest with curious eyes, this man who in five days will wish me a pleasant journey into eternity. He it is who will read aloud my burial service while I yet live. They have no sense of propriety, these men.
May a murderer talk of propriety? No! but he may think on it, and write on it, and no one may contradict him.
This ecclesiastic has never loved a woman and so has never hated one, nor killed her in his hate.
Her mouth was like a red wound, but it was evenly pale with her face before I gave myself to the police.
God! I did not mean to strike her down; I did not mean to, but I did. Once, I read that no one was responsible for alienating a woman's affections but her own husband. If this be true, I murdered her twice.
I stooped to her as she lay at my feet and straightened her collar, also I pinned back a strand of hair that had come loose. Margaret is the best name of all. I like to say it often—Margaret.
There are yet four days.
It is not given to any living being, man or beast, to know the hour of his death, else the monstrous horror would drive him mad. Yet, I know it and am not mad. It must be that I cannot believe it; that nature protects me with a density through which I may not penetrate, or that there are yet four days—ninety-six hours!
When I was at school, I kept a calendar on the wall and struck off the days till Christmas or Easter, when I would be home again. Most boys did.
The guards in the hallways talk of horses and women and, sometimes, they forget me and laugh aloud. I know they have forgotten me, for when they remember their voices drop suddenly to a whisper. I heard one of them tell of a half-Cree he shot through the heart at the time of the Rebellion. There was, he said, no doubt of its being in the heart, for the fellow drew up his right leg.
The tragedy of my approaching death is its impossibility. How can one realize his execution when the homely smell of hot wheaten bread sifts into his cell? There is the odour, too, of horse-sweat on the guards as they come into my cell. They are the Royal North-West Mounted Police.
I do not know why they are royal and I am criminal, for, after all, the distinction between us is of slight consequence. They do by law what I did contrary to law. The results are the same. On the whole I think they are the worse: their killing by rule is so monstrously premeditated. And yet, this side of the subject has never occurred to me till now that I am the prisoner of the police.
But why should I carp and gird at these fine fellows? They are only the instruments of the state, that is to say of the citizens. I myself, by taxation, have contributed to the expenses of the scaffold whereon I shall be executed.
The priest pleads with me that I may not die in my sin. He does not understand, and I may not tell him, that Margaret died in hers, and that I must do likewise if I would spend eternity with her.
He carries the whole dogma of the Church in his face and shoulders, this old priest, but he is a good man and sincere. His endeavour is to help and comfort me, but his words are short-armed to relieve my agony. Surely my soul has descended into hell.
To-day, he spoke of my mother, but I would not have it. One need not die a hundred deaths....
"Oh! little did my mother think
The day she cradled me
O' the lands I was to travel in,
Or the death I was to dee."
My dread is not from fear of the physical pain of hanging, for, after all, the life of every man and every woman ends in a strangle. It is that these men will lay their hands on me and bind me with a rope and that I may not forbid them. The indignity of it is unbearable. The prison stripes, the handcuffs, the black cap—these are from the devil's wardrobe.
It fills me with mute stupefaction, the mental picture I draw of myself when I am swung out on a rope, a grisly limp nothing of humanity; I who this minute am young and full of sap and sinew. I cannot endure that men should look upon my countenance twisted into an inhuman grimace; on my horribly bulging eyes, and on my tongue hanging out like the purple petal of the wild flag. It is not decent so to mutilate a man.
And when they have thus distorted my face, then will they blot out its hideousness with quick-lime like one would rub an ugly picture off a slate.
This malign system of burying murderers in lime, and refusing the body to friends, doubtless has its origin in the Roman custom whereby the remains of the Christians were burned to ashes and cast into the river so that not a vestige would remain. The Romans thought in this way they would deprive their victims of all hope of the resurrection.
The guard keeps a light burning at night that he may watch me the better. It is his duty to deliver me alive to the executioner. If I were so minded, I could sever the radial arteries in my wrists with my teeth and he would not know. This is why I laugh out loud and will not tell why I laugh.
The wind blows bleak across the prairies and the brittle snow-flakes that beat on the glass outside the iron-bars have a sound like the whirr of swords. I wish the wind would blow always, for it lays a salve on my soul.
On the third day.
My muscles ache for use in this two-by-nothing cell, and, now and then, a close-shut but invisible fist hits me under the heart so that I feel I must fall from numbness. It is stupid and super-brutal to refuse me space wherein to walk. To-day, I went through some gymnastic exercises and forgot long enough to hum an air that Margaret and I danced to at the military-ball at Edmonton less than a year ago. I am not sure of the words, but they concern "an old grey bonnet with a blue-ribbon on it."
My God! but I have been a bungler at living. I have wagered with life and lost. I know it while I wait here to pay the reckoning and the knowledge confounds me.
I keep sifting this question over and over—why is it that men are hanged by the neck till dead?
I asked the priest and he quoted the verse about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, yet it seems to me people sin more in the observance of this law than they would in its abrogation. It used to be said by the Jews there was a time to act for Jehovah by breaking His commandments.
There should come to me some severe punishment for the life I have taken, but it should be remedial in character rather than revengeful. Innately, I am not a criminal, and for thirty or forty years could be made to serve my race with the labour of my body and the sweat of my brain. It does not seem a good policy, nor economic, to kill a man in order to kill the evil that is in him.
Two days.
This morning, a silent, fat-faced man with inimical eyes came in and looked at me, as if appraising my weight. He dared not put his hands on me for I have yet two days.
I saw him once before, over two thousand miles from here, in a drug store in Toronto. The chemist told me this was Radcliffe and that he liked to play with children. He also said Radcliffe claimed to have adopted the profession out of purely charitable motives, there having been so many bunglings by amateur hangmen.
It is quite true what some one wrote that in waiting for the executioner to let him drop, society is revenged on the murderer.
As I sit here writing, there comes sharply to me on the frosty air the sound of hard hammering. There are two men working on my scaffold. I can tell from the recurring beats of the metal on metal.
It is appalling that the monstrous lesson these hammers are thudding out in the barracks yard has found me too late. It must always be late, for no man ever dreams that he will mount the scaffold.
No! I will not whine. I will not be a coward and gag at the gall, but, oh! I want to live so much. I want to live!