They certainly have, more of them than even my optimism expected and under circumstances when I have been amazed that their moral determination did not break. In my preconceived opinion, the most hopeless case I ever assisted surprised me by settling down, under favorable environment, into an honest, self-supporting citizen; and we may rest assured that he is guarding his boys from all knowledge of criminal life.
After I came to understand how all the odds were against the penniless one, scarred and crippled by repeated crimes and punishments, it was not his past nor his future that interested me so deeply as what was left of the man. I suppose I was always in search of that something which we call the soul. And I sometimes found it where I least looked for it—among the very dregs of convict life.
John Bryan stands out in clear relief in this connection. How well I remember my first meeting with this man, who was then more than forty years old, in broken health, serving a twenty-year sentence which he could not possibly survive. He had no family, received no letters, was utterly an outcast. Crime had been his "profession."[4] His face was not brutal, but it was hard, guarded in expression and seamed with lines. The facts of his existence he accepted apparently without remorse, certainly without hope. This was life as he had made it, yes—but also as he had found it. His friends had been men of his own kind, and, judged by a standard of his own, he had respected them, trusted them, and been loyal to them. I knew this well for I sought his acquaintance hoping to obtain information supposed to be the missing link in a chain of evidence upon which the fate of another man depended. I assured Bryan that I would absolutely guard the safety of the man whose address I wanted, but Bryan was uncompromising in his refusal to give it to me, saying only: "Jenkins is a friend of mine. You can't induce me to give him away. You may be sincere enough in your promises, but it's too risky. I don't know you; but if I did you couldn't get this information out of me." Knowing that "honor among thieves" is no fiction I respected his attitude.
However, something in the man interested me, and moved to break in upon the loneliness and desolation of his life I offered to send him magazines and to answer any letters he might write me. Doubtless he suspected some ulterior motive on my part, for in the few letters that we exchanged I made little headway in acquaintance nor was a second interview more satisfactory. Bryan was courteous—my prisoners were always courteous to me—but it was evident that I stood for nothing in his world. One day he wrote me that he did not care to continue our correspondence, and did not desire another interview. Regretting only that I had failed to touch a responsive chord in his nature I did not pursue the acquaintance further.
Some time afterward, when in the prison hospital, I noticed the name "John Bryan" over the door of one of the cells. Before I had time to think John Bryan stood in the door with outstretched hand and a smile of warmest welcome, saying:
"I am so glad to see you. Do come in and have a visit with me."
"But I thought you wanted never to see me again," I answered.
"It wasn't you I wanted to shut out. It was the thought of the whole dreadful outside world that lets us suffer so in here, and you were a part of that world."
In a flash I understood the world of meaning in his words and during the next hour, in this our last meeting, the seed of our friendship grew and blossomed like the plants of the Orient under the hand of the magician. It evidently had not dawned on him before that I, too, knew his world, that I could understand his feeling about it.