There followed a little rough kindliness, scouring and brushing and combing the lad into something less like a monstrosity. Teddy submitted as a child does and with a child's indifference to cleanliness.
So, too, he submitted in court, hardly knowing where he was or the significance of these formalities. Apart from the relief he got from his own reiterations, "I didn't do it, I didn't do it," the proceedings were a blur to him. When he was led out again down more steps, along more corridors, and cast into another stale and disinfected cell, he took it with the same brutish insensibility. He didn't know that the new cell was in that part of the House of Detention known as Murderers' Row, nor did he heed the hoarse questions whispered through the next-door grating, and which he could barely catch as they stole along the wall.
"Say, who'd ye do in? Did he croak right off? My guy didn't croak till three weeks after I give him the lead, and now they can't send me to the chair nohow. In luck, ain't I?"
To Teddy, this uncanny recitation was no more than the other sounds which smote the auditory nerve but hardly penetrated to the brain. They were all abnormal sounds, sprung of abnormal conditions, breaking in on a silence which was otherwise that of the sepulcher. Footsteps clanked—and then all was still; a door banged—and then all was still; a raucous voice shouted out a curse—and then all was still. The stillness was as ghostly as the sound, only that, as far as Teddy was concerned, so little reached his massacred perceptions.
The rattle of keys and the clanging of the door! He looked up from the bunk on the edge of which he was sitting listlessly.
"Lady to see you!"
This guard was young, smart, debonair, with a twinkle in his eye, and the first who didn't treat a comrade's murderer with instinctive animosity. Teddy got up and followed him in the stupefied bewilderment with which he had done everything else that day. Lady to see him! The words seemed to refer to something so far back in his history that he could hardly recall what it was. Once upon a time there had been a mother, a Jennie, a Gussie, and a Gladys; but they were now remote and shadowy.
Along corridors, up steps, and then along more corridors he tramped, till they stopped at an open door—and there he saw Jennie. In a room unspeakably bare and forbidding in spite of a table and half a dozen chairs she waited for him with a smile. He, too, did his best to smile, but his lower lip, swollen with the kick that had caught him in the mouth, made the effort nothing but a rictus.
For this, Jennie had been prepared by the snapshot in the paper. All the while she had been on the way to him she had been saying to herself that she must show no sign of horror or surprise. Even though she would follow the cue of her poor demented mother and pretend that he was in prison as a martyr, she would take no pitying or tragic note. She went forward, therefore, and threw her arms about him with the same offhand, unsentimental pleasure which she would have shown in meeting him after a brief absence at any time.
"You darling Ted! We're so glad to have found you. I thought I'd just run down and bring you some clean clothes."