CHAPTER XXIX
THE LONE BATTLE
During those months Harry's visible life had been turning in an endless cycle of new-gained habit that ruled with vicious and numbing precision the huge conglomerate of which he was but a single atom—a bitter, dragging treadmill in which he was constrained to tramp steadily round and round with the hands of the clock, marking time, as it were, in a painful void that changed with mocking reverberations.
The spectre that had smiled its cruel smile at him from the shadow in the little chamber back of the court-room had never left him. He had thrust it from him with all his strength, but it had come again and again to chuckle through the darkness.
"She!" it had sneered. "She for whom you risked and suffered so much! She whose fine courage you counted on—who you dreamed would rush to your defence, at any cost to herself! You need not have been afraid. She would have risked nothing. She cared for you—yes. But she cares a thousand times more for her place in the world's opinion. Why, she would have married Craig—married him!—rather than face a reflected shame from a story affecting her father. So much reputation means to her! Here you are in your stripes, a convict, and she knows it! She knew all along! She doesn't guess you saw her in the court-room: she didn't mean you to, of course. How she must have suffered from fear that you would drag her into it! No doubt she is afraid you may repent and call on her now to help you. Perhaps that is why she has gone abroad. That is the real Echo Allen! That is the woman you have loved!"
Should he call to her now, when she had left him to this suffering, giving him no little word of trust or gratitude? A painful fiery pride rose up in him. Not if his flesh was torn by red-hot pincers! Not in endless years, though every day were a separate hell, till he died! Never—never—never!
Seared by pride, tortured by despair, with the black agony of doubt clinging to him like a coat-of-mail, memory dragged him backward through infernos of suffering, thrusting its searching fingers into each cranny of his mind, mocking him with shifting pictures cruelly incongruous, that like a camera obscura turned and turned about a single focus—a grey old porch with Echo's figure leaning against a pillar and he looking up into her face. As though he had been a separate entity he saw himself moving through a thousand significant scenes of the flame-swept past—the long-gone, dead and buried yet living past—with her! And across these flitting outlines there stamped itself the forbidding legend that his ghostly guide showed Dante.... Lasciate Ogni speranza! By his own choice he had opened a bottomless chasm between the then and now, between the Harry Sevier he had been and the nameless convict branded by the righteous law, and this chasm was impassible and enduring. Ten years of oblivion, of loathsome existence under a number, of comradeship with felons, an interminable blank unlighted by one glimpse of joy! Years in which, at home, the mystery of his disappearance would pass from a nine-days'-wonder to a diminishing speculation, a vague curiosity, and at length to forgetfulness. His life, with its multiple ambitions, its hopes and strivings—its love—had been spilled like water into sand; there remained only the useless vessel, empty and dishonoured.
Time and again he experienced abrupt lapses into the blackest pit of despair, when he grappled with an aching desire to be quit of the puzzle of life, and by any one of a dozen means which lay at his hand, to leap into freedom. But there was in him something deep-lying and adamantine which forbade this solution.
Meanwhile time, after a fashion, went on. He breathed, ate and slept; he saw the dawn look in at his narrow window and the silken blue dusk drawn across its bars; his hands automatically performed mechanical tasks, as did the hundreds of others about him; and gradually, out of the very iteration of these homely things grew a passive equanimity, destitute of human comfort yet bringing with it a kind of numb acquiescence in which, though all unconsciously, his feet were feeling for new foot-hold on the submerged highway of life. And at length normal feeling, though dazed and bewildered, crept again to the surface; he was once more conscious of the sun and air, of the scent of green growing things that the breeze now and then wafted over the masonry, of the grey pigeons that pecked crumbs in the court-yard, and of the multitudinous human life that throbbed about him.
In all these months Paddy the Brick had been his cell-mate. By day in the shop, that rumbled with the clacking din of the tireless shoe-machines, they were separated. But they marched shoulder to breast in the loathed lock-step, they sat side by side at dinner and supper, and the iron bunks on which they slept—Harry on the upper one—were but a few feet apart. During the first days, while they were together in the cell, the other had watched him glumly and suspiciously, speaking only when he must and then morosely, so that Harry had wondered dully whether that whirl of rage in which he had smashed the flask of whisky against the window-bars had not further embittered his lot by an irreparable enmity.
More than once, by the devious means known to such places, Paddy the Brick had procured whisky, and this—though he risked offering no more to his companion but drank it secretly in his bunk at night—had put Harry through other bitter tests of self-control. For the wilful license of the day on which he had ceased to be Harry Sevier had granted fresh and terrible power to the cringing thing that had been mastered and manacled, and the fight he had fought out in that long year Harry had had again to renew, and now without the zest of reward. Again and again, as he sat in his cell, or fed the pungent leathern strips into the clacking shoe-machines in the shop, without warning the demon of thirst had swooped upon him, making his dry throat ache with uncontrollable longing, his palms tingle with itching desire: and at times, when he awoke gasping with the reeking fumes in his nostrils, and heard the gurgle of the liquor in the dark, he had fought with a strenuous desire to fling himself bodily upon his companion and snatch the drink to his own arid lips—fought till the struggle turned him faint with anger, disgust and self-contempt.
What lent him in these bitter months the strength for this unequal struggle? Most of all the knowledge that the appetite which he now grappled with in himself, was the patron Genius of that house of Pain. He had learned it from his fellows there, in whose faces alcohol had set its recognisable marks, its baleful brands of ownership. He knew it from a score of dismal histories related by his incorrigible cell-mate, daily allusions, the famished eagerness with which the surreptitious flask was passed from hand to hand. The Spirit of Drink had seemed to him at length to sprawl, a huge, lethargic incubus, over that tortured congeries of crime. Till slowly, very slowly—as human feeling had earlier come to him out of his blankness and torpor—there had dawned in him a mute consciousness of a victory over himself that was to be enduring. The conquest he had thought he had made in that first year of studied avoidance had been no true one. Under stress of anger, grief and resentment, it had fallen in shameful and utter defeat. The real victory that he knew now, had come to him in that prison garb, when black despair had sat by his side through long months—the fruit of a strength born of familiar hand-touch with evil temptation and a hatred of the tempter.
As time went on, the surly mood of his cell-mate had grown less difficult, had even softened to a sneering tolerance.
"You're improving!" he said one day with a smirk. "So you're making up to the Gospel-Sharp, eh?"
It was a Sunday, when the shops were empty and silent, and the long grey-black serpentine, with its hitching lock-step, had wound to the Chapel for the weekly platitudes and then back to the clammy, wintry dormitory, to drop its human links at their numbered cells. That day for the first time, the plodding, oleaginous chaplain had noted the new figure in the stolid ranks and had stopped to speak to him—a commonplace to which Harry had responded with a mere word.
"You'd better make up to the Warden!" Paddy the Brick continued. "He's the cock-of-the-walk here. I'd like to smash that oily face of his!"
"I've nothing against him," replied Harry evenly. "He does what he's here to do."
"He'd better keep his nose in his office," said the other darkly. "He'll walk through the shops once too often! I know a man around the corner who'd give his neck to 'get' him—he's a lifer, and nothing makes much difference to him!"
He crossed the narrow cell as he spoke, and sitting on one of the three-legged stools that constituted the cell's only movable furniture, took a bent tin spoon from under his jacket and began to tap upon the wall. Harry had sometimes seen him at this occupation—a kind of crude signalling he had thought it. Now, however, some rhythm in the sound caught him, reminding him of the click of the keys in a telegraph office. "What is that you are doing?" he asked, as the other stopped.
"Doing?" Paddy the Brick turned his narrow eyes over his shoulder. "I've been having a chat with an old pal of mine in the upper tier. That's what."
"Talking?"
"Yes. It's the prison-wireless. Didn't you ever hear of that?"
"No."
The other rose and pulled away the blanket from the foot of his bunk. There in the whitewashed wall was a double row of minute scratches. "That's the alphabet," he said. "It's mighty handy—we work it by relay. I can call up any cell on this side in fifteen minutes. Better learn it," he added jeeringly. "You'll have plenty of time!"
Harry's gaze turned back to the little barred window with its meagre square of blue. The time he had been there was to be measured only by months, yet how century-long had dragged the leaden-footed procession! His painful reverie was broken by Paddy the Brick's voice, jarring and malicious:
"Ever read the Bible?"
The other had taken the small dingy volume—the sole book the place afforded—from its shelf, and was lying on his back on his bunk, his eyes peering over its rim.
"Yes," answered Harry, slowly. "Why?"
"I've found one good thing in it: 'Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne.' Ho-ho!" he chuckled. "Reckon I'll ask old Coffin-Face to preach on it next Sunday in Chapel. I'd sure enjoy it. I had a lawyer once—damn him!"
The flare of evil passion in the closing epithet seemed to Harry like a wicked spurt of flame from some sudden crack in cooling lava, leaping out to sear him. His face was turned away—toward the little square of barred window—and his voice was hoarser than usual, as he asked:
"Why do you hate him so?"
Paddy the Brick hurled the Bible into the corner with an imprecation. He rose to a sitting posture, his features working.
"Because he did it for me!" he said. "He might have cleared me ... and he didn't try. And I never took the money they said I stole—never, so help me! It was a put-up job. They 'planted' the stuff on me, when I was drunk. It was a pay-day and I knew they were up to something, for they'd sworn they'd drive me out of the logging-camp—and yet I hadn't sense enough to keep sober!" He gave a harsh and bitter laugh, and his voice rose. "But it was my lawyer friend that really did the business! He was a dead swell—one of your la-de-das with money and automobiles—that played at lawyering. They told me he was a great man and I was fool enough to believe them. What did he care for my case—it was a little one to him! I was nothing but a lumberjack! Why should he soil his kid gloves with me?"
He turned to Harry's white face a livid countenance. "So now I'm here," he finished, "and I don't give a rip if I am, either!"
"Woe unto you also, ye lawyers!" Parallel with the wholesale indictment another text in that self-same book was flashing through Harry's mind: "For with what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again." Was that, after all, no trite generality applicable to a hypothetical hereafter, but a thing true in the minute and multinomial affairs of the present? Did chance, or fate—or whatever the human mind called the great Deus ex Machinâ—watch somewhere, with hand upon the lever, adjusting the nice balance to the subtle requirements of some occult law of retribution that, though hidden, was yet as certain as gravitation?
As Harry saw the reddened eyes glowing with hatred, the curving fingers, the crouching figure, he said to himself, "This is my work—mine and whisky's. He was a simple woodman who laboured six days of the week and on the seventh traded half his wages for 'moonshine' from some illicit mountain still. Whisky set his feet in the toils, yet but for me he might have lived there forever in the timber, treading his narrow groove like a blind horse on a ferry, not one whit worse than his fellows, with no agonised conscience, a simple product of his environment. But I—and whisky—fastened the bonds upon him. I did it. I sent him here. I gave him hatred of society, the warfare that has already marked him with the mark of the beast. This is what I did. And now I am plucked up from my place and planted here beside him, as soiled in the eyes of the world as he! Is it because I was the instrument of his demoralisation that the tables have now been turned?—because he who takes the sword shall perish by the sword? And in the last great evening-up, is it written that I shall become even as he?—that bars and chains shall have their will of me and I emerge at last, like this incorrigible ruiné, hard, debased, besotted, beyond hope or redemption in the world?" He shuddered. Better even that that shot in the library had gone home—that he now lay, innocent as he was, with the red mark on his throat, down in the horrible quick-lime!
He rose, and with his hands gripping the bars of the open door, drew a long breath. No! whatever this pent-house did to him, it should never drag him down! He would take his medicine. For what, in his egregious folly and egotism, he had done, he would pay—if fate demanded, to the uttermost farthing. But out of its prison his soul, sometime, should come unblanched, and unabashed!