It was Number Five, I think, who informed me that it is the custom down here for the keeper to visit us every four hours—at half past twelve and half past four. The first visit I have described. After that, for nearly three hours, I get such sleep as the hard floor affords. About half past four I am having an interval of semi-consciousness—enough to realize dimly how utterly worn out I still feel both in body and mind, and how both crave more rest. So I am struggling very hard not to awake, when the light of the keeper’s electric bull’s-eye flashes through the iron grating straight into my eyes.
With curses too violent and sincere for utterance I report myself still in existence.
Now I am so constituted that at the best of times a sudden awakening always annoys me greatly. Just now it quite upsets my equilibrium. A torrent of rage and hate surges up through my whole being; it fairly frightens me by its violence. For a moment I feel as if I were being strangled. Then I make up my mind that I must and will get to sleep again, in spite of the keeper and his infernal light; and I make desperate attempts to do so, for I realize that I am expected to speak in chapel before many hours, and have a trying day before me. I am bound, therefore, to have myself in no worse condition than I can possibly help.
But of course it is impossible to get to sleep again, I can only follow my whirling thoughts. How in the world am I ever to speak to those men in chapel? What in Heaven’s name can I say? How can I trust myself to say anything? How can I urge good conduct, when my whole soul cries out in revolt? How can I preach resignation and patience against this dark background of horror?
An aching, overwhelming sense of the hideous cruelty of the whole barbaric, brutal business sweeps over me; the feeling of moral, physical and mental outrage; the monumental imbecility of it all; the horrible darkness; the cruel iron walls at our backs; the nerve-racking monotone of the whirring dynamo through the other wall; the filth; the vermin; the bad air; the insufficient food; the denial of water; and the overpowering, sickening sense of accumulated misery—of madness and suicide, haunting the place. How can I speak of these things? How can I not speak of them? How can I——
Hark!
Click! Click! Click! Click! I hear the levers being pressed down by the officer, and the stirring of life along the galleries.
Click! Click! Click! Click! I had no idea it was possible to hear the sounds from the south wing, ’way in here. And it is still so early in the morning—only half past four.
Click! Click! Click! It must be the prisoners who work in the kitchens, they are the only ones who would be moving at such an hour. But again, how is it possible to hear them so far away, shut in as we are by stone walls and iron doors?
Uneasily I shift my position and turn over on my left side, which feels temporarily less bruised and painful than the other. The clicking stops. But other vague sounds succeed; and then suddenly——