In another house in the outskirts of Lisbon, with a beautiful garden, where the warm air was filled with the scent of flowers in masses of rich color, I met another lady of the old régime, a beautiful girl, living solitary, also, and agonized because of the imprisonment and ill treatment of her relatives. She implored me to use what influence I had, as an English journalist, to rescue those unhappy men.
It was my mission to get into the prisons, and see what were the real conditions of captivity there. After frequent visits to the Foreign Office, I received permits to visit the Penetenciaria and the Limoero, in which most of the political prisoners were confined. The guide who went with me told me that the Republic had nothing to hide, and that I could see everything and talk as much as I liked with the captives. He was certain that I should find the Penetenciaria, at least, a model prison. The other was “rather old-fashioned.”
On the whole, I preferred the old-fashioned prison. The “model prison” seemed to me specially and beautifully designed to drive men mad and kill their humanity. It was spotlessly clean and provided with excellent sanitary arrangements, washhouses, bakehouses, kitchens, and workshops, but the whole system of the prison was ingeniously and, to my mind, devilishly constructed to keep each prisoner, except a favored few, in perpetual solitude. Once put into one of those little white cells, down one of the long white corridors, and a man would never see or talk with a fellow mortal again until his term of penal servitude expired, never again, if he had a life sentence. There were men in that place who had already served ten, or fifteen, or twenty years. Through a hole in the door they received their food or their day’s ration of work. To exercise them, a trap was opened at the end of their cell, so that they could walk out, like a captive beast, into a little strip of courtyard, divided by high walls from the strip on either side. Up above was the open sky, and the sunlight fell aslant upon the white-coated walls, but it was a cramped and barren space for a man’s body and soul. Perhaps it was no worse than other European prisons, possibly much better. But it struck me with a cold horror, because of all those living beings isolated, in lifelong silence, entombed.
One corridor was set apart for the political prisoners, and when I saw them they were allowed to have their cell doors open, and to converse with each other, for a short time. Otherwise they, too, were locked in their separate cells. I spoke with a number of them, all men of high-sounding names and titles, but a melancholy, pale, miserable-looking crowd, whose spirits seemed quite broken by their long captivity. They were mostly young men, and among them was the Portuguese count who had led the counter-revolutionary rising and had been captured by the Republican troops. They had one grievance, of which they all spoke passionately. The Republic might have shot them as Royalists. At least that would have enabled them to die like gentlemen. But it had treated them like common criminals and convicts, and had even forced them to wear convict garb, to have their heads shaved, and to wear the hood with only eyeholes which was part of the dress—horrible in its cruelty—of all long-sentence men. My conversation with most of them was in French, but two young brothers of very noble family spoke excellent English. They seemed to regard my visit as a kind of miracle, and it revived hopes in them which made me pitiful, because I had no great expectation of gaining their release. When I went away from them, they returned to their cells, and the steel doors clanked upon them.
In the prison called the Limoero there were different conditions of life, enormously preferable, I thought, to the Penetenciaria, in spite of its filth and dirt and disease. There was no solitary confinement here, but crowds of men and women living in a hugger-mugger way, with free intercourse between their rooms. They were allowed to receive visitors at stated times, and when I was there the wives of many of the prisoners had come, with their babies and parcels of food. The babies were crawling on the floor, the food was being cooked on oil stoves, and there was a fearful stench of unwashed bodies, fried onions, tobacco smoke, and other strong odors.
The Fleet Prison, as described by Charles Dickens, must have closely resembled this place, in its general system of accommodation and social life, and I saw in many faces there the misery, the haggard lines, the despair, which he depicts among those who had been long suffering inmates of that debtors’ jail.
Many of the men here were of the aristocratic and intellectual classes, among them editors and correspondents of Royalist papers, poets, novelists, and university professors. They had not been charged with any crime, they had not been brought up for trial, they had no idea how long their captivity would last—a few months, a few years, or until death released them. But at least in equal proportion to the Royalists—I think in a majority—were men of poorer class—mechanics, printers, tailors, shoemakers, artisans of all kinds. They, too, were political prisoners, having been Socialists, Syndicalists, and other types of advanced democrats.
Some of the men told me that they had no idea whatever why they were lodged in Limoero. They had been arrested without charge, flung into prison without trial, and kept there without hope of release. Quite a number of them had been imprisoned by the Royalist régime in the time of the monarchy, and the Republic had not troubled about them. They were just left to rot, year after year.
The political prisoners were allowed to receive food from their relatives, but many had no relatives able to provide them, and they had nothing but prison fare, which was hardly enough for life. They begged through the bars of the windows to passers-by, as I saw them, with their hands thrust through the iron gratings. Owing to the overcrowding and insanitary conditions, disease was rife, and prison fever ravaged them.
I had been told of one prison called Forte Mon Santo, on a hill some distance away from Lisbon, and as I could get no official pass to visit it, I decided to try and gain admission by other means. In the Black Horse Square at Lisbon, I hired a motor car from one of the street drivers, and understood from him that he was the champion automobilist of Lisbon. Certainly he drove like a madman and a brute. He killed three dogs on the way, not by accident, but by deliberately steering into them, and laughed uproariously at each kill. He drove through crowded streets with a screeching horn, and in the open countryside went like a fiend, up hill and down dale. I was surprised to find myself alive on the top of the hill which, as I knew by private directions, was the prison of Mon Santo.