CHAPTER XII
THE FIGHT
IT was not so many hours, so many days, so many weeks, so many months—it was a numberless succession of periods so loosely defined one from the other that they merged without perceptible demarcation into a single whole that, in itself intangible, held no concrete idea of time.
To Varge, it was as though he were in the midst of a space, drear and dead, that had no boundary, that above and below and on either hand was limitless, through which he had journeyed and must journey without hope of coming to the end. What was behind him was not a consciousness of distance travelled, spurring weariness to new life with the cheering knowledge that part of the road was traversed; it was, instead, only a dull consciousness that he had walked for an æon of time as upon a path which was but the circumference of a circle, where with each step taken the distance before him was remorselessly identical with what it had been before.
The earlier mornings, the later evenings, the disappearing snow as he marched to and fro across the penitentiary yard marked a change of season—but that was all. It was a change, purely impersonal, utterly extraneous, that held nothing of interest, nothing in common with him or those within the four grey walls.
There had been breaks in the monotony—not pleasant breaks, breaks to which the monotony was a boon. Harold Merton's visit—bad days and nights had followed that. And then the horror of that forty-eight hours of solitary confinement in the blackness, that had been—Varge raised his head and looked around him—it was afternoon and he was amidst the now all too-familiar surroundings of the carpenter shop. A sense of strange unrest was upon him, premonitory, pregnant of something he could not define. It had been with him that morning, yesterday in a lesser degree and vaguely, intermittently, for a week now. It was as though this afternoon it were attaining culmination. Yet now the surroundings were as they always were—there was no change—there was never any change.
Down the shop, by the entrance to the stock-room where the lumber was piled and the tools were kept, Wenger, the guard, with heavy, red, florid face, narrow-eyed, the under lids puffed out and hanging like flabby little sacks, leaned against the door. There was the same coarse sneer on his lips that was always there, and the red in his face seemed to flaunt, as it always flaunted, the twenty-two white, bloodless faces that rose above grey-and-black striped bodies here and there about the room. There was the same hoarse, guttural snapping of the planer eating its way along the surface of a rough plank; the shriller note of the flying band-saw, ending each time in a sharp crescendo as it worked clear of the wood. Twisty Connors' cunning little eyes met his and drifted away with a furtive glance toward Wenger; the instructor at his desk was busy over blueprints; old Blackie Lunn, the man who coughed at night, the man on account of whom he had got that forty-eight hours of "solitary," the most pathetic figure in the room, grey-haired, with hollow, hectic-flushed cheeks and burning eyes, crouched wearily, apathetically, over his work a few yards away.
Varge's eyes dropped to his bench—it was as it always was. His brow clouded—a prescience that had never failed him was with him now. What was it? It embraced Wenger; and it embraced Twisty Connors and the harder element in the shop that tacitly recognised Twisty's leadership—the Butcher, a giant of a man, beetle-browed, sullen-faced; Spud; the Mouser; Scotty and a dozen more—counterfeiters, forgers, cracksmen, desperate men to whom consequence was an unknown word. And it embraced, too, vague rumours, that lived tradition-like amongst the old-timers and was spread to the new, of an old brick sewer long out of use that led beneath the prison walls to the creek a quarter of a mile away, whose abandonment, so it was said, the town authorities had ordered years ago as it polluted the stream. No one seemed to know where it was—all talked of it, and each had his own idea. It lived for them much as the odour of baking bread wafted from a shop lives for the starving wretch without—there was bread; its existence held a glimmer of hope.
All these were as pieces of an elusive puzzle which Varge sought now to put together; and in that effort, logically, his mind went back to the first day—when Wenger had struck him with his cane. He had looked Wenger in the eye after that blow for a long time—and it had been Wenger's eyes that had dropped. That had been the beginning—he had earned the brutal, bullying enmity of the man then. Daily, with nagging persecution, that enmity had grown. "I'll break you and I'll make you crawl"—the very repetition of the words in Varge's mind brought now a curious whitening of his lips. No day had passed—except those two, that forty-eight hours in the blackness—that Wenger had not said those words, no change, the same words, that phrase, "I'll break you and I'll make you crawl," thrown at him casually across the bench, spoken unexpectedly in his ear, but always spoken, never a day without that taunt—a taunt that had brought Wenger more than once very near to death, so near that even now Varge shut his eyes and fought with his beating brain.
Wenger—yes; there was cause for the unrest there—and not alone on account of the other's treatment of himself. Other guards were strict, perhaps harsh, but they were human; this man was a bully of the lowest type who gloried in his malicious tyranny, suave and sleek to his superiors—not a convict in his charge, save one or two of his favourites who fawned upon him, but would have torn him limb from limb if they dared—and some of them dared, given but a shadow of a chance—Twisty Connors, for instance, and the Butcher and their pals.
They had even broached it to him—and hinted darkly at other things as well—sounding him, testing him, trying him out, after Twisty, with the natural superstition of his illiterate kind to whom luck was the only deity at whose shrine homage was ever paid, had taken the initiative. Seven-seven-seven—lucky seven! "Mabbe there's something I'll let youse in on one of these days," Twisty had said. It had a strange ironic effect. He had felt himself gradually being cultivated and accepted into the fraternity that comprised the worst and most unscrupulous convicts in the penitentiary; he had found himself being invested with unwelcome authority, regarded with envy and something akin to unholy respect by the others, the lesser breed without the fold. But the opportunities for Twisty's confidences, and the Butcher's, and the others', apart from their own caution, had not been many—Wenger had seen to that. It had taken two months to arrive at the point where a rising and the "bumping off" of Wenger was mooted—"when all was ready," Since then, they had drawn away from him—his answer had been little to their liking.
Again Varge's eyes swept slowly, lingering on details, around the shop. Wenger, for the moment, had gone into the stock-room. Twisty Connors and the Butcher were dividing their glances between each other and the narrow, open doorway of the stock-room through which Wenger had disappeared. The instructor still sat at his desk beside the big iron doors in the centre of the side wall that gave entrance and egress to the shop; the heavy steel key, a foot in length, polished from much usage, hung from a hook above his head and glinted in the sunlight. A line of stooping, listless figures, their loose-fitting prison dress adding a uniform appearance of gauntness to each, were dotted along the length of the bench beneath the iron-barred windows. Another bench, paralleling the first, ran halfway down the middle of the room—his bench, where he worked. A half-dozen machines, each with a striped form bent over it, occupied the rest of the floor space to the end wall, in which was the stock-room door. A figure scuffled from his bench, taking some work to the saw; between the two benches, the Butcher and another convict were varnishing a piece of furniture that had just been completed.
Once more, Varge's eyes dropped to his work.
When what was ready? Had Blackie Lunn answered that question—or was it, the common rumour as a basis, but a vagary of the old man's mind? Was it really here, that sewer—somewhere at hand—were Twisty Connors and his few choice spirits the possessors of the secret, as Blackie Lunn so evidently believed?
The scene of a week ago lived again before Varge in its every detail. The old man sidling, as he believed unobserved, to his, Varge's, bench and plucking with trembling, eager fingers at his sleeve, the hoarse, dull, quavering whisper—Blackie, like the rest of the outsiders, had believed him to be one with Twisty Connors, with the Butcher and the rest.
"You'll let me in on it, won't you?" Blackie had pleaded feverishly. "You'll let an old man in on it, won't you? For God's sake don't say no! You ain't been here long enough to have your heart all dried up. Twisty says I ain't got the sand. You speak to him—you tell him I have. I have got sand. Oh, for God's sake let me in on it—it's killing me in here—I got to get out or I'll die. I know what's going on. The tunnel's done and they're at the brick now and—"
That had been all. Wenger's sneering face had come between them.
"Tunnel, eh?" the brute had snarled viciously. "What's this about a tunnel, you—"
The words had ended in a piteous scream, as Wenger with a sudden movement had jerked the old man's arm behind him and twisted it brutally. That scream was ringing now in Varge's ears, the hollow, agonised features were before his eyes, as they had been that day. It had lasted the bare fraction of a second. His fist had whipped to Wenger's jaw—and Wenger had stretched his length upon the floor, stunned, a full ten feet away.
He had not done it impulsively—instantaneously almost as was the act, quick as was the rush of anger at Wenger's coward deed, he had struck the blow with cold, sober deliberation. He had known the consequences—an assault upon a guard was the last act he could hope to commit with impunity. It was the offence heinous, and its punishment was—the lash—the lash, strapped to the triangular black "horse" that he had seen one day in the corridor of the underground cells. There was no excuse for an assault upon a guard—none—it was the lash.
They had taken him then to the warden's office, and Wenger, smooth, plausible liar, had told his story, guarding himself at every point.
"He's a bad egg," Wenger had stated to the warden. "He's in thick, as I've told you before, with the worst of them. Why, there ain't a day goes by that I don't have to warn him."
Just God! Would it come some day to that?—when human endurance would be at an end, when his brain would stagger and reel with mad drunkenness, and Wenger's blood be on his soul!
He had watched those keen, steel-grey eyes, watched the warden's face, he remembered, trying to read in them his sentence. Six lashes?—twelve?—eighteen ?—twenty-four? His heart had shrunk from it, crying out within him to speak, to give the lie to this man, to plead wildly for himself. It was not the physical pain he feared; it was the degradation, the utter ignominy, the black horror of a disgrace greater, it seemed, than he could bear; it was not his bare, naked flesh that would quiver and writhe from the curling lash, it was his bare, naked soul. And he had said no word. He could not demean himself by a defence that he had no hope would be believed and, worst of all, would but add to the malignant satisfaction of Wenger, who would see in it a whine for mercy.
And then Warden Rand had spoken:
"Two days in solitary confinement."
No lash! He could have sobbed with relief. He had been given leniency. Why? He had not known then—he did not know now. He had thought of it through those hours of horrible, dead, silent blackness, and no answer had come. He had escaped what few, if any, had ever escaped before for the same act.
It had not been so bad at first in that cell. It was afternoon when he went in, and the six little round ventilating holes in the bottom of the door threw tiny shafts of light across the floor. In the beginning he had not given them any thought; then they had absorbed his whole attention, and he had watched them with strained eyes, as though to rivet the yellow flickering threads and hold them in their places on the floor. They had grown shorter and shorter, receded to dull grey circles on the door that were like three pairs of glazed eyes mocking at him as the light gradually died in their depths. Then there was blackness in which he could not see his hand before his face, and the sense of a heavy, crushing weight, growing more and more intolerable, that settled upon him and seemed to rob his brain of its normal functions, filling it instead with wild, fantastic, terrifying thoughts; then a mental suffocation, as one buried alive—forgotten. That had taken a strangling hold upon him—he was shut off, lost—if he should be forgotten there! He had slept, and waked to watch for those yellow threads; and had slept again and waked once more still to find they had not come, then—
His train of thought was rudely interrupted, and with a shock he was brought back to his immediate surroundings. A convict, with face like chalk, his eyes staring, came racing madly from the stock-room—and then the words poured from him in a high-pitched, jumbled torrent.
"Wenger's seen him!" he yelled. "It's all up. Four months diggin' down to the brick, a handful at a time, my Gawd, an' it's all up! He's seen Scotty comin' out from beneath the lumber pile. It's all up, Twisty—an' us down to the sewer with only a few bricks to kick loose!"
In Twisty was no misplaced leadership.
"Den beat it now!" he screamed. "It's our only chance. Youse guys knows what to do. Croak Wenger first, an' beat it! Spud, you an' de Mouser get de rest uv dem bricks loose an'—"
The words were drowned in wild confusion—Varge was already racing toward the stock-room door—over his shoulder he saw the instructor crumple up and wriggle to the floor from a blow over the head from a billet of wood in the Butcher's hands. Twisty, Spud, the Mouser, a dozen more, were close at his heels. The heavy face of Wenger, his hand locked in the collar of a convict he was shoving before him, loomed up in the doorway.
"Croak 'im! Croak 'im! I tho't youse were all right!" shrilled Twisty, in the belief that Varge was but leading the rush. "T'ree-sevens gets the foist crack at'im!"
Mad with the lust for blood, mad with the lust for freedom they were. There was no thought now of personal wrongs in Varge's mind—hound and cur though Wenger was, he was at least a human being—they would tear him in pieces like wild beasts. And freedom—they were guilty men—criminals—a prey on society—what right had they to freedom!
Wenger's face had gone from red to grey, fear was in it, then came a brutish look of animal courage. He wrenched at his pocket for his revolver, but the convict in his grasp—Scotty—turned suddenly and flung his arms around him.
A bull-like roar and an oath came from Wenger as Varge neared him.
"I'll get you anyway!" he bellowed.
"Fight, Wenger! Get free from that man! Fight for it if you want to live!" Varge flashed at him—and turned to face the on-coming rush.
It was upon him like an avalanche. A little crouched, he met it. It seemed to shiver and part and break and go scattering backward as a tempest's wave breaks in futile fury against the rocky cliff.
Execrations, a torrent of blasphemy, curses and yells, was its echo; two forms were stretched upon the floor.
And then they came on again, a sea of them, the stamp of hell in the starved, white faces and glittering eyes—and leading them now, not Twisty, not the Butcher, was the poor, bent, disease-racked form of old Blackie Lunn.
"I got sand!" the old man shrieked. "I got—"
The words died in a gurgle, and he pitched forward on his face. Blackie Lunn had won his freedom. Wenger, freed from Scotty for an instant, had fired.
Varge was shoulder to shoulder with Wenger now, and the guard's revolver was spurting in a steady stream—but it never checked them—as savage beasts the convicts swarmed upon them, leaping to close quarters to bear the two men down before the very weight of their charge, to kill and gain the door that was only a yard away.
From him, tearing them from Wenger 's neck and shoulders, Varge with his mighty strength hurled away now one, now two, of the murderous wolf-pack. Again and again, he freed the guard and himself, and swept clear the space before the door. Again and again, his massive shoulders heaved and threw them back, and as his arms worked in and out, in and out, like smooth well-oiled steel piston-rods, men went down before the fearful blows; but again and again, like striped human tigers, lashed to frenzy as much now by fear behind if they should not escape as the hope of freedom ahead, they still came on. The minutes passed. Twisty Connors, with a quick dart forward, wrapped himself around Varge's knees. The towering form of the Butcher, a chisel in his uplifted hand, sprang for Wenger. Varge stumbled—then, a wriggling thing, he swung the form of Twisty high above his shoulders and flung him, a human catapult, at the Butcher. The Butcher dropped like a log—and Twisty's body lay quivering atop the other's.
Something was blinding Varge—he dashed his hand across his eyes—the blood was pouring over his forehead. They were armed now with chisels, adzes, hatchets, gouges, and they stabbed and struck in desperate fury. His jacket, slashed and cut, hung half-torn from one shoulder.
Wenger with clubbed revolver, long since emptied, was labouring heavily, reeling unsteadily upon his feet; and now, with a groan, he crashed forward on the floor. They snatched at him like ravenous beasts at their prey.
Varge felt his own strength going. There was a wound in his side somewhere that was numbing him; and the gash in his head was making his brain swim in a sickly fashion, filling it with a queer singing noise. They had dragged Wenger toward them along the floor—he sprang and dashed them back, and planted himself over the guard's body.
He was weakening. Turmoil, chaos, flashing lights were before his eyes. He fought mechanically now—they were too heavy for him—five on his shoulders and arms, he could not hold them up—what was that group of striped, timid things that cringed back in the far end of the room against the wall? Why were the big iron doors open?—the bell had not rung. What were those black forms that were rushing through the door toward him?—those hoarse, strident commands? He was free, they were no longer clinging to him, hacking at him—his strength must have come back—they had given it up—and not one had reached the tunnel. Varge raised his hand again to brush the blood away from his eyes—it was growing very dark—he was tottering, falling, and his hands, to save himself, groped out—into blackness.