"How happy would I be could I plant some thotte in the harte of my friend that would give her pleasure for many a long day." And when referring to some evidence of my remembrance of my prisoners, he said: "We always love those littel for-gett-me-nottes that bloom in the harte of our friends all the year round. Remember that we can love that which is lovely."
Dwelling on the loneliness of prison life and the value of even an occasional letter, he writes: "The kind word cheares my lonely hours with the feelings that some one thinks of me. Human nature seems to have been made that way. There are many who would soon brake down and die without this simpathy."
Always was there the same incongruity between the spelling and a certain dignity of diction, which I attributed to his familiarity with the Psalms. His affinity with the more denunciatory Psalms is still occasionally evident, as when he closes one letter with these sentences: "One more of my enemies is dead. The hande of God is over them all. May he gather them all to that country where the climate is warm and the worm dieth not!"
To me this was but the echo of fragments of Old Testament teaching. At last came one letter in which the prisoner voiced his fate in sentences firm and clear as a piece of sculpture. This is the letter exactly as it was written:
"My Dear Friend:
"I hope this may find you well. It has bin some time since I heard from you and I feel that I should not trespass on you too offten. You know that whether I write or not I shall in my thottes wander to you and shall think I heare you saying some sweet chearing word to incourage me, and it is such a pleasant thing, too. But you know theas stripes are like bands of steel to keep one's mouth shut, and the eye may not tell what the heart would say were the bondes broken that keep the lippes shut. If one could hope and believe that what the harte desired was true, then to think would be a pleasure beyond anything else the world could give. But to be contented here the soul in us must die. We must become stone images.
"Yourse truly,
"Hiram Johnson."
Not for himself alone did this man speak. "To be contented here the soul in us must die." "We must become stone images." From the deepest depths of his own experience it was given to this unlettered convict to say for all time the final word as to the fate of the "life man," up to the present day.
After this single outburst, if anything so restrained can be called an outburst, Hiram Johnson subsided into much of his former immobility. Like all "life men" he had begun his term in prison with the feeling that it must come to an end sometime. What little money he had was given to a lawyer who drew up an application for shortening of the sentence, the petition had been sent to the governor, and the papers, duly filed, had long lain undisturbed in the governor's office. When I first met Johnson he still cherished expectations that "something would be done" in his case, but as years rolled by and nothing was done the tides of hope ran low. Other men sentenced during the sixties received pardons or commutations or had died, until at last "old Hiram Johnson" arrived at the distinction of being the only man in that prison who had served a fifty-year sentence.
Now, a fifty-year sentence does not mean fifty years of actual time. In different States the "good time" allowed a convict differs, this good time meaning that by good behavior the length of imprisonment is reduced. In the prison of which I am writing long sentences could be shortened by nearly one-half: thus by twenty-nine years of good conduct Johnson had served a legal sentence of fifty years. No other convict in that prison had lived and kept his reason for twenty-nine years. Johnson had become a figure familiar to every one in and about the place. Other convicts came and went, but he remained; plodding along, never complaining, never giving trouble, doing his full duty within its circumscribed limits. Altogether he had a good record and the authorities were friendly to him.
Hitherto I had never asked executive clemency except in cases where it was clear that the sentence had been unjust; and I had been careful to keep my own record high in this respect, knowing that if I had the reputation of being ready to intercede for any one who touched my sympathies, I should lower my standing with the governors. But it seemed to me that Johnson, by more than half his lifetime of good conduct in prison had established a claim upon mercy, and earned the right to be given another chance in freedom.
I found the governor in a favorable state of mind, as in one of his late visits to the penitentiary Johnson had been pointed out to him as the only man who had ever served a fifty-year sentence. After looking over the petition for pardon then on file and ascertaining that Johnson had relatives to whom he could go, the governor decided to grant his release. But as an unlooked-for pardon was likely to prove too much of a shock to the prisoner the sentence was commuted to a period which would release him in six weeks, and to me was intrusted the breaking of the news to Johnson and the papers giving him freedom. We knew that it was necessary for Johnson to be given time to enable his mind to grasp the fact of coming release and to make very definite plans to be met at the prison-gates by some one on whom he could depend, for the man of forty-seven would find a different world from the one he left when a boy of eighteen. It gives one a thrill to hold in one's hands the papers that are to open the doors of liberty to a man imprisoned for life, and it was with a glad heart that I took the next train for the penitentiary.