With pride and a wealth of detail he confided these professional secrets to his spectacled little bunkie after he came to know him. A fragment at a time he told Looms of his life, his likes and dislikes, and his associates in crimedom. He taught Looms the tricks of the prison, too—how to pass messages; how to curry the favour of the keepers; how, when so desiring, to smuggle contrabands in and out; how to talk with one’s neighbours while at work or at mess, where silence is demanded, which same is accomplished with the eyes facing straight ahead and the words slipping sidewise from the corners of the mouth, the lips meantime moving but little. Considering the differences [34] in them, they came to be pretty good friends.
Evenings and Sundays and holidays The Plumber would take the floor, literally as well as figuratively. He would stand at the door of their cell, shifting from foot to foot like a caged cat-animal in quarters too small for it, and sniffing like an animal through the small squares of the iron lattice; or else he would pace back and forth the length of the cell, constantly scraping his body between the wall and the edge of the upper berth. In these movements he found relief from his restlessness.
And while The Plumber walked and talked Looms would lie prone on his bed listening or making notes. For making these notes he used an indelible pencil, and for greater security against discovery he set them down in shorthand. The shorthand was partly of his own devising and partly based on an accepted stenographic system. As fast as he filled one sheet of paper with the minutely done, closely spaced lines he pasted it to another sheet; so that in time he had a long, continuous strip, all written over thickly with tiny, purplish-blue characters. Being folded flat and thin and inclosed in an envelope made of thin leather pilfered from the shoe shop, this cipher manuscript was carried by Looms inside his shirt during the day, and it went under his pillow when he slept. Once a week he was sent to the baths. At such times he hid the precious packet beneath his mattress.
[35]
The Plumber, of course, had abundant opportunity to examine these notes; but naturally enough he could make nothing of them. Privily he catalogued Looms—or Williams, which he thought was his cell-mate’s name—as a sort of harmless lunatic; in short, a nut. Looms meantime made copy out of The Plumber. He meant to use The Plumber as a character in his book—as one of the principal characters. A criminal of the type of The Plumber ought to furnish much material; and without his suspecting it he did furnish much.
At the end of nine months they parted. The Plumber, having completed his term, went forth to sin some more. Thereafter Looms had a cell to himself. Before very long, his record being clean, he was the recipient of a mark of favour from the warden’s office. He became a trusty. As a trusty he was doubly alert to win special privileges for himself. He knew all the tricks and devices of the place by now. Outwardly he was every inch a convict—a commonplace convict if not a typical one. Inwardly he now frequently caught himself slipping into a convict’s mode of thinking—found himself viewing his prison existence, not as an observer of the system but as an integral part and parcel of the prison machine.
Drugged by the stupefying monotony of it he felt sometimes as though he had always been a convict. The days passed, leaving no conscious impressions on the retina of his brain. It was [36] as though he rode on an endless band, which circled once in twenty-four hours, never changing its gait or its orbit. It took an effort to rid himself of this feeling.
The graybacks which crawled over his body at night, coming out of the cracks of the wall and the folds of his blanket to bite his flesh, no longer made him sick, for they were part of the system too.
Not once did he regret what he had done to get himself into Sing Sing.
The first year went by thus, and the second, and Looms entered on the third. He still kept his flat packet of manuscript close and safe, wearing it in its leather envelope next to his skin; but now he added no more notes in his cryptic shorthand code. He told himself he added no more because he already had at his fingers’ ends, waiting to be transcribed into copy, the whole drama of prison life—the poisons it distills; the horrors it breeds; its qualities and its inequalities; its wrongs that might be reformed and its wrongs that can never be reformed. This was what he told himself. The fact remained that for the last seven months of his imprisonment he set down no notes.
At the end of the third year he was discharged.