“Is there any last word you would like to say?” whispered the chaplain in his ear.
Knatchbull looked up, cast a critical eye over the ghastly apparatus, and, nodding his head in the direction of a defect, said, with the utmost composure:
“Yes. There’s a kink in that rope!”
In another second his lifeless body was swinging at the end of the incriminated hemp. He afforded, then, did Captain Knatchbull, the supreme instance of “the ruling passion strong in death.” He must pay the extreme penalty, but he had respectfully suggested that the execution should be ship-shape.
When he returned to England, Bachelor was appointed to Dartmoor. While he was abroad he could only get at the Home Office by means of a correspondence. Now he would be able to pay personal visits to the high officials in Whitehall during his holidays. No man ever made himself a greater nuisance to a Department in the sacred cause of humanity than did Bachelor. But humanity is a mere unofficial generality with which Whitehall has nothing whatever to do. He bombarded permanent officials, and he obtained introductions to successive Home Secretaries with a view of effecting some amelioration in the condition of the convict. When, by his own personal influence with the prisoners at Dartmoor, he was successful in quelling the biggest and most elaborately organized mutiny known up to that time, he became no more of a persona grata than he had been before the outbreak. Officially he was merely the gaol chaplain. It was not the business of the Department to discover that they were dealing, not only with a humanitarian, but with a man who had forgotten more criminology than all the outsiders who write so glibly on the subject in journals and magazines had ever known.
I at once confess that Bachelor was not attracted to me at this dinner at Verrey’s by any qualities of my own. He understood that I was on the Press, and he always endeavoured to create an interest in his views among pressmen whom he met. For some time he had urged on the Home Office the necessity there existed for supplying prisoners with a newspaper. His theory, founded upon years of intelligent observation, was that under our prison system a man becomes either abnormally ingenious or abnormally bestial. And he held that nothing except literature could successfully divert and dissipate ideas which were likely to become obsessions; and that the most interesting literature would be news—very carefully edited, of course—of the outer world. American officials are not so hidebound as the home-made article; and the idea of my friend, neglected and contemned in England, was welcomed and adopted in the United States, where the principal penitentiaries now run their own newspapers.
We worked together subsequently at this notion of a gaol journal, and I got out a “dummy” which showed pretty fully what the proposed organ should be. At the Home Office the science of circumlocution is better understood than in any other Department in Whitehall. There was voluminous correspondence, meaning much on the part of the parson, meaning little more than a lavish waste of the tax-payer’s stiff stationery to the Home Office. Other ardent souls would have sunk under the continuous disappointments, delays, shufflings, impertinences, and utter indifference, of the Office; but Bachelor’s was not a nature to sink under anything. He was a man of the world; his sympathy with his incarcerated parish did not stand in the way of his own reasonable pleasures. So he kept on pegging away at Home Secretary after Home Secretary, always hopeful, cheerful, débonnaire. At last his reward came. A large parcel of monthly magazines of the Leisure Hour and Good Words type was delivered at his house, with a communication from the Home Secretary. The chaplain was requested to go through the bundle, and select such of the publications as, in his opinion, might be usefully circulated among prisoners.
Had such an act of brutal cynicism been played on the average man, he would have probably pitched the periodicals into the dustbin, and ceased to interest himself in the unfortunate creatures for whom he struggled in vain. But Bachelor had a finer temper than the average man. He reflected that a few crumbs are better than no bread at all. He congratulated himself that he had obtained some concession—small though it was—for those whose cause he had been fighting through weary years. He sat down before the bundle, conscientiously read through every magazine contained in it, and made his selection of publications deemed to be “suitable” under the very strict and elaborate instructions laid down by the Office in the covering letter.
And so it happens that the Cameo Room in Verrey’s became always associated in my mind with convicts and their champion. In those days a dinner served there was the last word in modern luxury. A big chandelier with the hundred pendent crystals hung from the centre of the ceiling. In mid-Victorian days the chandelier, with its prismatic glass pendants, was regarded as the most swagger thing in the decoration of a saloon. Candles guttered under their red shades, science not having as yet supplied the simple preventive contrivance. The dinner was beyond cavil or criticism. The contents of the cellar had been carefully selected, and its temperature was religiously observed and maintained. But the conditions attendant . . . As the wheels of my taxi turn from the rattle of the Strand and run silent over the rubber pavement on the courtyard of the Savoy, I recognize how far, in some matters, we have travelled in a very few years.