"Sure."
They entered, and stood just inside the door. A young German, in the gray convict garb, was seated at a piano, his delicate hands straying over the keys. One gas-jet burned in the wall above the piano, shedding its faint circle of light around the pianist, glistening on the dark panels of the instrument, lighting the pale face of the boy--he was but a boy--and then losing itself in the great darkness that hung thick and soft and heavy in the vast auditorium. Marriott looked and listened in silence; tears came to his eyes, a vast pity welled within him, and he knew that never again would he hear the Ode without experiencing the pity and the pain of this day. He wished, indeed, that he had not heard it. The musician played on, rapt and alone, unconscious of their presence.
"Tell me about that fellow," said Marriott, as they stole away.
"Oh, he was a musician outside. The warden lets him play. The warden likes music. I've seen him cry when Ernsthauser plays. He plays for visitors, and he picks up, they say, a good bit of money every day. The visitors, except the Sunday-schools, give him tips."
"How long is he in for?"
"Life."
The word fell like a blow on Marriott. Life! What paradoxes were in this place! What perverted meanings--if there were any meanings left in the world. This one word life, in one part of the prison meant life indeed; now it meant death. Was there any difference in the words, after all--life and death? Life in death; death in life? With Archie it was death in life, with this musician, life in death--no, it was the other way. But was it? Marriott could not decide. The words meant nothing, after all.
The delay in the chapel kept Marriott in the prison for half an hour. He would not watch the convicts march again to their cells; he did not wish to hear the clanging of the gong nor the thud of the bolts that locked them in for the night.
The warden, a ruddy and rotund man, spoke pleasantly to him and asked him into his office. The warden sat in a big swivel chair before his roll-top desk, and, while Marriott waited, locked in now like the rest, they chatted. It was incomprehensible to Marriott that this man could chat casually and even laugh, when he knew that he must stay up that night to do such a deed as the law required of him. The consciousness, indeed, must have lain on the warden, try as he might not to show it, for, presently, the warden himself, as if he could not help it, referred to the event.
"How's Archie taking it?" he asked.