Thoughts, images, desires, which I had been used from my youth and all through my life to consider unhealthy, degenerate or simply unworthy of my attention, came sneaking into my subconscious mind, in the form of disgusting, appalling, terrifying dreams. The back yard of my mind had begun to register and absorb all the wretched, unclean, monstrous, unmentionable yearnings, desires and actions of the collective prison dreams; it was inhaling the moral stench which arose as from a "cloaca maxima."
I thought of all the weak, unbalanced, receptive young minds which must have been corrupted by this intangible, powerful magnetism; and of how this unnatural, abnormal, degrading prison life began in any absorbent or indifferent temperament a slow corrosion and led to a complete and effective disruption and destruction of all moral and intellectual integrity.
I felt as if hundreds of unspeakable and undreamed of sins, taking shape of gliding snakes, noiseless and black, with glittering eyes and fiery tongues, were descending upon me, winding round my body and my legs and arms, fastening their pin-like fangs in my flesh to poison my brain and body.
And I thanked my stars and my fate and my power of will when the last night of my sentence arrived to relieve me of an oppressive, suffocating succession of nightmares.
I did not sleep one solitary wink, but how rosy, exquisite, exhilarating, radiant, were the thoughts that filled me on that prison cot, how transparent those bars seemed on that last night, never to be forgotten, like the first night I spent in that horrible dungeon.
XXVII
I am finally called downstairs. The sun streaming through the narrow bars gives the gloomy prison almost a bright appearance. Hastily I put on my street clothes. I feel like a man putting on a strange, exotic costume for a fancy dress ball; the collar and necktie seem to choke me with a kind of joy and affection. Accompanied by my lawyer, I walk out of the fateful gates, and then I turn to look back, and to glance upwards to the hospital windows where the patients and the old keeper wave a friendly salute and farewell.
Friends are waiting to greet me at the other side of the river. I look in wonder and amaze at the people in the streets. Everything is so interesting; the most commonplace and sordid sights are delightful and picturesque. The men; the women, with their wonderful clothes; the sky, the houses, the cars, the signs, everything, seem so novel, so friendly; every minute so precious, so full of surprises and possibilities.
I have grown fat and pale in prison, but my spirit is as light and quick as the spirit of a humming bird. Everybody greets me as a traveller returned from a strange, unknown, and very distant land—and yet all the while I have been living in the very heart of the metropolis. Everybody seems to realize and to reassure me that the acceptance of a pardon would have been a grievous mistake. To refuse it meant a great sacrifice, but making that sacrifice has confirmed a general suspicion that unfair methods, dangerous to American traditions, have been used against me.
The day of reckoning will come in time. Meanwhile, how beautiful, perfect, intoxicating is the sense of untrammelled liberty! It repays me for many a dark, tragic hour.