Discipline before all. Not because a fellow is sick is he to break discipline.
So the sick lay in their narrow cells gasping in vain for fresh air, gasping in vain for some cooling drink, or some little simple delicacy to incite their enfeebled appetite.
The dying were locked up at the fixed hour for locking up, and found dead at the fixed hour for opening. How they had died—no one knew. At what hour they had died—no one knew. Whether in some choking struggle a human hand might have saved them by changing a suffocating position or the like—no one knew.
But this all knew—that these our sinful brethren had died, not like men, but like vultures in the great desert. They were separated from their kith and kin, who however brutal would have said a kind word and done a tender thing or two for them at that awful hour; and nothing allowed them in exchange, not even the routine attentions of a prison nurse; they were in darkness and alone when the king of terrors came to them and wrestled with them. All men had turned their backs on them, no creature near to wipe the dews of death, to put a cool hand to the brow, or soften the intensity of the last sad sigh that carried their souls from earth. Thus they passed away, punished lawlessly by the law till they succumbed, and then, since they were no longer food for torture, ignored by the law and abandoned by the human race.
They locked up one dying man at eight o'clock. At midnight the thirst of death came on him. He prayed for a drop of water, but there was none to hear him. Parched and gasping the miserable man got out of bed and groped for his tin mug, but before he could drink the death agony seized him. When they unlocked him in the morning they found him a corpse on the floor with the mug in his hand and the water spilled on the floor. They wrenched the prison property out of its dead hand, and flung the carcass itself upon the bed as if it had been the clay cast of a dog, not the remains of a man.
All was of a piece. The living tortured; the dying abandoned; the dead kicked out of the way. Of these three the living were the most unfortunate, and among the living Robinson and Josephs. Never since the days of Cain was existence made more bitter to two hapless creatures than to these—above all to Josephs.
His day began thus: Between breakfast and dinner he was set five thousand revolutions of a heavy crank; when he could not do it his dinner was taken away and a few crumbs of bread and a can of water given him instead. Between his bread and water time and six o'clock if the famished, worn-out lad could not do five thousand more revolutions and make up the previous deficiency he was punished ad libitum. As the whole thing from first to last was beyond his powers, he never succeeded in performing these preposterous tasks. He was threatened, vilified and tortured every day and every hour of it.
Human beings can bear great sufferings if you give them periods of ease between; and beneficent nature allows for this, and when she means us to suffer short of death she lashes us at intervals; were it otherwise we should succumb under a tithe of what we suffer intermittently.
But Hawes, besides his cruelty, was a noodle. He belonged to a knot of theorists into whose hands the English jails are fast falling; a set of shallow dreamers, who being greater dunces and greater asses than four men out of every six that pass you in Fleet Street or Broadway at any hour, think themselves wiser than Nature and her Author. Josephs suffered body and spirit without intermission. The result was that his flesh withered on his bones; his eyes were dim and seemed to lie at the bottom of two caverns; he crawled stiffly and slowly instead of walking. He was not sixteen years of age, yet Hawes had extinguished his youth and blotted out all its signs but one. Had you met this figure in the street you would have said:
“What, an old man and no beard?”