Time and again he experienced abrupt lapses into the blackest pit of despair, when he grappled with an aching desire to be quit of the puzzle of life, and by any one of a dozen means which lay at his hand, to leap into freedom. But there was in him something deep-lying and adamantine which forbade this solution.
Meanwhile time, after a fashion, went on. He breathed, ate and slept; he saw the dawn look in at his narrow window and the silken blue dusk drawn across its bars; his hands automatically performed mechanical tasks, as did the hundreds of others about him; and gradually, out of the very iteration of these homely things grew a passive equanimity, destitute of human comfort yet bringing with it a kind of numb acquiescence in which, though all unconsciously, his feet were feeling for new foot-hold on the submerged highway of life. And at length normal feeling, though dazed and bewildered, crept again to the surface; he was once more conscious of the sun and air, of the scent of green growing things that the breeze now and then wafted over the masonry, of the grey pigeons that pecked crumbs in the court-yard, and of the multitudinous human life that throbbed about him.
In all these months Paddy the Brick had been his cell-mate. By day in the shop, that rumbled with the clacking din of the tireless shoe-machines, they were separated. But they marched shoulder to breast in the loathed lock-step, they sat side by side at dinner and supper, and the iron bunks on which they slept—Harry on the upper one—were but a few feet apart. During the first days, while they were together in the cell, the other had watched him glumly and suspiciously, speaking only when he must and then morosely, so that Harry had wondered dully whether that whirl of rage in which he had smashed the flask of whisky against the window-bars had not further embittered his lot by an irreparable enmity.
More than once, by the devious means known to such places, Paddy the Brick had procured whisky, and this—though he risked offering no more to his companion but drank it secretly in his bunk at night—had put Harry through other bitter tests of self-control. For the wilful license of the day on which he had ceased to be Harry Sevier had granted fresh and terrible power to the cringing thing that had been mastered and manacled, and the fight he had fought out in that long year Harry had had again to renew, and now without the zest of reward. Again and again, as he sat in his cell, or fed the pungent leathern strips into the clacking shoe-machines in the shop, without warning the demon of thirst had swooped upon him, making his dry throat ache with uncontrollable longing, his palms tingle with itching desire: and at times, when he awoke gasping with the reeking fumes in his nostrils, and heard the gurgle of the liquor in the dark, he had fought with a strenuous desire to fling himself bodily upon his companion and snatch the drink to his own arid lips—fought till the struggle turned him faint with anger, disgust and self-contempt.
What lent him in these bitter months the strength for this unequal struggle? Most of all the knowledge that the appetite which he now grappled with in himself, was the patron Genius of that house of Pain. He had learned it from his fellows there, in whose faces alcohol had set its recognisable marks, its baleful brands of ownership. He knew it from a score of dismal histories related by his incorrigible cell-mate, daily allusions, the famished eagerness with which the surreptitious flask was passed from hand to hand. The Spirit of Drink had seemed to him at length to sprawl, a huge, lethargic incubus, over that tortured congeries of crime. Till slowly, very slowly—as human feeling had earlier come to him out of his blankness and torpor—there had dawned in him a mute consciousness of a victory over himself that was to be enduring. The conquest he had thought he had made in that first year of studied avoidance had been no true one. Under stress of anger, grief and resentment, it had fallen in shameful and utter defeat. The real victory that he knew now, had come to him in that prison garb, when black despair had sat by his side through long months—the fruit of a strength born of familiar hand-touch with evil temptation and a hatred of the tempter.
As time went on, the surly mood of his cell-mate had grown less difficult, had even softened to a sneering tolerance.
"You're improving!" he said one day with a smirk. "So you're making up to the Gospel-Sharp, eh?"
It was a Sunday, when the shops were empty and silent, and the long grey-black serpentine, with its hitching lock-step, had wound to the Chapel for the weekly platitudes and then back to the clammy, wintry dormitory, to drop its human links at their numbered cells. That day for the first time, the plodding, oleaginous chaplain had noted the new figure in the stolid ranks and had stopped to speak to him—a commonplace to which Harry had responded with a mere word.
"You'd better make up to the Warden!" Paddy the Brick continued. "He's the cock-of-the-walk here. I'd like to smash that oily face of his!"
"I've nothing against him," replied Harry evenly. "He does what he's here to do."