“Reaction—yes or action.—Costing us thousands of dollars anyway. Confound the little fool!”
III.
Mr. Constable’s physician recommended rest and a complete change of scene. With all the world to choose from, the patient made a peculiar selection for his place of sojourn. It was Sing Sing, on the Hudson. But Mr. Constable strictly complied with the Doctor’s advice in not allowing anyone to know his address.
There is not much to be seen in Sing Sing except the State Prison, but Mr. Constable saw that very thoroughly. For two days he spent all the time allotted to visitors in making himself acquainted with convict life. He was writing a novel, he told the Warden, and wanted local colour. No—he did not know any one in the prison—he was an Englishman, and only on a visit to this country. Would he like to make a tour of the buildings with the Warden? Nothing, he declared, would give him greater pleasure—he was interested in every detail. So, escorted by the Warden, he passed through the clean, well-aired corridors, inspected the orderly kitchens and the huge laundries, viewed the immense workshops filled with convicts toiling in splendid, disciplined silence, watched the men file to their meals, their hands hooked over one another’s shoulders, their heads bent down, eyes upon the ground, bodies close together, and their feet keeping time in the lock-step prescribed by the regulations.
It was all very impressive, he told the Warden—a wonderful triumph of system and discipline. He congratulated the official, and was invited into the private office for a smoke and chat.
Did the Warden suppose there were any innocent men in the cells? Very likely there were some—it was not uncommon for prisoners to have new trials granted them, and occasionally a man would be acquitted on these second trials. Did many of the men return after serving sentence? Yes, a good many. Why? Well, principally, the Warden supposed, because it was hard for an ex-convict to get an honest job after he got out. “Damned near impossible, unless he has mighty good friends,” the official added feelingly.
Was not that a reflection on the system? Well, the Warden wasn’t there to pass on that—the Prison Association had undertaken to handle the question, but he couldn’t see that they’d done much with it.
But the innocent men—the men who were afterwards acquitted—they would be—they were not ex-convicts? No, the Warden guessed they were all right. And the pardoned ones? The Warden smiled.
“I’m not very strong on pardons myself,” he admitted. “I’d about as soon employ an out-and-outer. Too much politics in pardons for me. Moreover, sometimes they’re not appreciated. We had a queer fellow here once who served five years, and was a model prisoner too. Well, when he was discharged someone met him at the station with a pardon from the Governor. ‘You cur,’ he shouted at the man who handed it to him, ‘get pardons for those who need them!’ With that he tore the paper into bits, threw the pieces in the man’s face and gave him a terrible thrashing. We never learned what the trouble was, though the fellow served two more years for the assault. But some of us thought he must have been innocent all the time. However, when he came out again nobody offered him another pardon.”
The next day Mr. Constable visited the prison without the escort of the Warden. In the work-rooms the silence of the workers oppressed him, but it was better than the language of some of the under-keepers which fairly sickened him. He had heard foul-mouthed men hurl epithets and profanity back and forth often enough, but never before had he seen the frightful answers which human beings can make without the utterance of a syllable. Many times that day he saw murder done with the eyes—the foulest, fiercest, most glutting murder of which the human heart is capable. In every regulation he saw manhood debased, individuality destroyed, education neglected, reformation defeated, and glancing from the faces of the convicts to those of the keepers, he could not say which this “splendid system” had most brutalised.