And so it proved.
Fred's first introduction was to the dining room. It was not an extraordinary place, and yet Fred gave a little gasp as he entered it and stood staring almost foolishly at the tables set with clean linen. Three of its sides were made up almost entirely of windows, before which the shades were drawn to shut out the hot noonday sun, and its floor of polished hardwood glistened even in the subdued light. They sat down in the first seats that came to hand, and it was not until some cold meat was passed that Fred discovered a knife and fork at his place. The meat was neither choice nor dainty, but somehow just the fact of this knife and fork gave it extraordinary zest. Later on, small pats of butter were circulated and a spoonful of sugar apiece for the tea. And once again he listened to people talk while they ate … heard a subdued, but sane, laugh or two… There was a smoking room also, not overlarge, but adequate.
The inmates of Ward 6, from whom Fred had stood aloof, welcomed him warmly. He was at a loss to know why until Monet explained.
"It's the cigarettes."
"Ah, then you distributed them here? I thought they went to the other poor devils."
The youth turned a wistful glance toward him. "I knew you'd get over to this place finally … and I wanted them to like you…"
Fred fell silent over the implied rebuke.
The dormitories were large and light and airy and scrupulously clean, but the usual institutional chill pervaded everything… Yet, for a season, Fred Starratt found all discrimination smothered in his reaction to normal sights and sounds. But, after a day or two, the same human adaptability that had made him accept the life in Ward 1 as a matter of course rose to the new environment and occasion. Presently his critical faculty flooded back again—almost for the first time since his arrest. And he knew instinctively that he was standing again on surer ground. He began to wonder, for instance, just what the commonwealth was doing for these human derelicts which it shed such facile tears over… He knew, of course, what it had done in his case. It had given him three indifferent meals, vaccinated him, put him through a few stereotyped quizzes to assure itself that he was neither insane nor criminal, and finally moved him on to a less trying but an equally vacuous existence. He used to wonder just what tortures the others had endured during that week of probation in Ward 1, which, in nearly every case, so far as he could learn, included the experience of the bull pen. For, after all, these other men were physically shaken from excess—weak, spent, tremulous. He had been through mental tortures, but, at least, his body and soul had had some fitness for the strain upon him. How close did the winds of madness come to snapping clean these empty reeds … how many were broken utterly? He asked Monet.
"Lots of them go under," Felix Monet had returned. "I think I came very near it myself… I remember that first night I spent alone in Ward One… I'd been three weeks without a drop of anything to drink. Cut off, suddenly, like that!" He made a swift gesture. "And all at once I found myself in a madhouse. I actually knocked my head against the wall that night… And, in the morning, came the bull pen… They knew I wasn't insane. My record—everything—proved that! … When I protested, their excuse was that everyone was equal here … there were no favorites. … More lies in the name of equality! The thing doesn't exist—it never has existed. Nothing is equal, and trying to make it so produces hell. They're always trying to level … level. They want to strip you of everything but your flock mind. Ah yes, timid sheep make easy herding!"
For the first time Fred Starratt saw Monet quivering with unleashed conviction, and he glimpsed the hidden turbulence of spirit which churned under the placid surface.