I obeyed with reluctance. I was concerned with Maynard, not his psychopathic cases. We had not seen each other since our college days, twenty years before, and I had hoped for a return of our old intimacy during these few hours together, which chance had thrown in my way.
I had knocked about the world, acquiring the kaleidoscopic knowledge of life accorded the globe-trotter. Maynard had stayed at home, tinkering with the mental workings of the human machinery until his name stood for the accomplishment of amazing things in the realm of psychopathy. Each had run true to form: Maynard’s passion was to make the wheels go round; mine to wonder why they went.
“This is Number Twenty-Seven,” Maynard continued, as he stopped before a cell door. “I’ll let her tell her own story.... Good morning, Mrs. Howard. How are you this morning?”
At his words, a woman slowly rose from a bench against the far wall of the cell. Then, abruptly, she made a sudden rush that ended in a frantic shaking of the iron bars of the cell door where we stood.
“Doctor Maynard! You’re a-goin to let me out, ain’t you? You’re a-goin’ to let me go home an’ rub Jim’s head so’s he can sleep? Jim cain’t sleep unless I rub his head for him. You know he cain’t, Doctor! I’ve told you so, often.”
“Yes, yes. You’ve told me often, Mrs. Howard.” Maynard gave me a significant glance. “But tell me again, please. Maybe I will understand better this time and let you go.”
The woman strained her gaunt body against the cell door. She seemed in a torture of anxiety, obsessed by a vital current of emotion in sharp contrast to the pitiful meagerness of her personality.
She wore a cheap cotton dress; her hair was plain about her sharp face; and there was written upon her countenance that look of repression, of negation of all right to exist as an individual, which marks the poorer type of rural woman.
It seemed for a moment as if she would break into a torrent of words; then abruptly she fell back, silent, and the heartbreak in her eyes was succeeded by a slow-growing horror. Yet her tragedy, whatever it might be, brought with it a certain dignity which she had hitherto lacked. Her attenuated homeliness forbade distinction, yet when she made pitiful apology to Maynard, a certain nobility of soul shone from her eyes.
“I’d forgot for a minute, Doctor Maynard, that I’d killed Jim. I’d forgot that I hated him. I was thinkin’ he was alive and that I loved him like I used to before the children was killed. I’m a wicked woman—the wickedest woman that ever lived; but I wouldn’t be in this penitentiary if Jim could a-slept without havin’ to have his head rubbed.”