Before I had time to complete my request he interrupted me, and shaking his fist at me, yelled: "A pair of trousers! What do you think of that dude in the hospital wanting a new pair of trousers! Go on back to your hospital, you dirty bum. You ——! Get out!"
I turned back slowly without answering, trying meanwhile to puzzle out how I could represent two such different social extremes in the mind of the irate keeper—a dude and a dirty bum!
When I related the incident to my hospital keeper, he shook his head and declared the head keeper an uncouth, stupid animal, and promised to speak about it to the Deputy. Next day a runner brought me a brand new pair of striped trousers, which looked quite becoming and a good fit after the rags I had worn for so long.
XIX
A great many doctors come to visit the hospital. Sometimes the young students from the city hospital, then the aristocratic and famous surgeons who operate on desperate cases, specialists, all grades and classes of physicians, enter accompanied by the little doctor who lives upstairs on the top floor. His name is B. Davidson. He is so small that he seems almost a schoolboy; his eye-glasses are the only elderly thing about him. But he is very efficient, scrupulous and—a marvelous thing in prison—humane in his treatment of the convicts.
The warden and the keepers hamper him continually in his work, as he will not listen to their opinion about convicts who, according to them, are all fakers. They have the temerity to place their ignorance, and their hatred of the prisoners, against the professional knowledge and humanity of the doctor.
The boy who had a tumor on his back was kept a week locked in a cell, and was not allowed to see a doctor, because the keeper claimed that he was faking. The doctor laughed when he related the story. "Imagine anybody faking a tumor the size of a cocoanut!"
In the opinion of most prison keepers, every man who reports on the sick list is an incipient faker. The sick man has to inform his own keeper and he is then reported to the head keeper. Should they diagnose the case as a fake, then the prisoner is shoved back gently to the line; but should the convict in spite of their verdict insist that he is sick, he is locked up in a cell to get well without a doctor, or to rot in it, until even the doctor's help is of no avail.
Most cases of consumption, paralysis, insanity, or any internal disorder, are considered fake cases. Only when a man breaks a limb or splits his head open, or when some disease "breaks out" on him, is he believed to be sincere.
The sturdy young sailor who had worked at my side in the tailor shop was brought to the hospital. He was so changed that I hardly recognized him. I had to ask him his name, and if he remembered having worked in the same shop with me, before I became convinced that he was the same man.