I’ve seen the slaves of conventionality incarcerated in the strongholds of Christian cities; dragged through London in the prison-van—called the workman’s train—handcuffed by the official grip of the twelve commandments of the book of civilisation, their dead eyes staring, still alive, and the grip of iron-mouthed starvation of the soul and body on their brows and limbs. But that sight was as nothing compared to the wretchedness of those poor wretches in Noumea who had failed to comply with the laws of equity and justice of La Belle France.
“They look like convicts, don’t they? It’s printed on their faces!” said a comrade of mine, once, as we were led, by the officials, down that terrible Madame Tussaud’s of the South Seas—a monstrous show where the figures stood before one with blinking, glassy eyes, men stone dead, standing upright in their shrouds, undecayed, though buried for years!
“Yes, they do look like convicts,” said I, wondering what I would look like with head shaved, face saffron-hued, front teeth knocked out by some zealous official, an infinity of woe in my eyes, No. 1892 on the lapel of my convict suit, my back bent with what memories. Yes, I felt that I should be slightly changed. I felt I should not have looked like a saint. I had some idea that I should be an extremely vicious-looking convict. But there, why worry? They have never caught me at anything yet.
But to return to our French host. That night my comrade and I slept in a little off-room together. It was pitch dark in that stuffy chamber. My friend went to sleep soon after he had finished his cigarette and I was left alone with my thoughts, that strayed to the convict settlement in La Nouvelle.
I imagined that I saw the convict prisoner awaiting his last sunrise: I saw the gloomy corridors that lead out to the presence of that vast tin-opener, that knife that lifts the hatchway of immortality with one swift slide—the guillotine.
I saw the convict’s haggard face and trembling figure as he stood, at last, before that dreadful cure for insomnia. There he stood, awaiting death, as the dawn crept higher and higher on the sea’s horizon. Already the pale eastern flush had struck the palms on the hill-tops of that isle and lit up the faces of the huddled surveillants who awaited the fall of the knife.
Yes, I saw that scene. The thought of the headless body and the blood was nothing to me. It was the victim’s agony, the thought of the mind’s attempt to grasp, to comprehend, its extermination, then the last thought of—God knows who. It was this that made my heart go out to him, for I knew that I might have been in his place if I had had his same chances.
As these things haunted my brain, the world took on a nightmare form. In that strange, intense reality that comes to one in dreams, when things are more vivid than when we are awake, I felt all that convict’s thoughts—I became him.
I looked on the world for the last time. They led me forth: I heard the last bird singing in the coco-palms. I felt that I deserved death by that atrocious blade; I could not remember the crime, but it was sufficient that I had displeased Man. The knife looked down at me, wriggled, seemed to grin and clink out in this wise:
“Ha! Ha! Ha! Thou hast displeased thy fellow-beings—they who never sinned—thou must die!”