CHAPTER IX
THE WHEEL
IN neither a day nor yet in a week did Varge find himself. Battling, battling, battling incessantly—at night in his cell, by day in the carpenter shop where he had been put to work—the fight went on within him. And it was an uneven combat; for, fine-grained, keenly sensitive, delicately strung, even his mental faculties revolted at every detail of the life about him, and joined issue with the full-veined, red blood within him that would not know restraint.
Men talked around him, men moved around him—and they were all alike. At first, he did not differentiate one from another—each was as the others were—a black-and-grey striped form that shuffled in heavy boots, whose hair was close-cropped and whose faces were like white parchment in colour.
These were his associates; and in outward appearance each one of the hundreds was himself. It was as though on every hand, at every turn he faced a mirror that was thrust suddenly before him with inhuman jest, that mocked and taunted him and aroused within him a terrible, crushing sense of the annihilation of all personality, goading him to some wild act that would at once vindicate his individuality—and end it all.
These were his companions—and none but these, in his and their narrowed world, could have any community of interest with him. Amongst themselves they seemed to find some satisfaction, some relief in the common bond, grim, drear and heavy-weighted though it was, that linked them together—Varge found none.
He had shuddered as he had felt the hands of the man behind him on his shoulders when the lock-step formed—and once, that was the first day, he had involuntarily jerked the man's hands away, and the guard, Wenger, one of the day guards in the carpenter shop, had struck him smartly with his short cane. It was not easy yet to lay his own hands on the shoulders of the man in front of him in that dull-treaded, scuffling, humiliating march. It was not pride in its caddish sense—it was the natural revulsion of a clean-souled, clean-handed man from the familiarity, the touch, the intimacy of guilt.
Pitiless days!—that ate into the iron of his soul as remorselessly as drops of acid eat to the metal's core. Even the air around him, the air he breathed, was different from the air of the world without—it was heavy, always heavy, charged with the nauseating odour of disinfectant. And always, ever, there were bars of steel, and iron doors, and walls of stone—and eyes upon him, watching him with cold relentless vigilance even in his sleep.
At night, he would awaken and listen—a terrible silence would be around him; then a soft tread would mount the iron steps, up one tier, then another, come along the steel bridge and stand like a black shadow before the bars of his cell. He would sleep again. Cheerless dawn, harbinger of waking hopelessness, would creep through the high windows that faced the cells across the empty space between the outer wall and the iron-railed platform that ran the length of the corridor before the cell doors of the upper tiers. A gong, strident, harsh, imperative from the central hall, would echo clamorously through the prison. Another gong and another—always the same—the locks along the cells would lift with a sharp, metallic click—the huge, steel gates at the end of the corridors swing back—and he would be one of the striped line that stood in sullen silence on the platform waiting the command to move. "Tier Number One—march! Tier Number Three—march!"—the bark of the guards' voices from the different wings would come rolling raucously to his ears. Then that dull, dead fall of feet in heartless unison, as a file moved forward—and another, and another—the routine of the day begun.
It never changed—that march to the prison yard in the morning, one hand on the next man's shoulder, carrying their night-buckets in the other—the first, deep-drawn intake of fresh air robbed of all its sweetness, for even here there were grey walls everywhere; and men, sharp-eyed and keen, leaning on grounded carbines, looked down on them from above.
They marched back; they filed by the kitchen and took their tin pans of food, and bread from the stacked slices—and as caged beasts ate it—their keepers watching from high stools between the long bare tables and against the walls. In lock-stepped files they went to their work—Varge across the yard again to the carpenter shop close to the centre of the rear wall. At noon again they ate their tins of food; at evening again they ate their tins of food—then the same huge, steel gates before the corridors closed behind them as they tramped through; each stopped before his cell, entered, pulled the barred door shut behind him and the locks from end to end of the tier fell into place—another leaden day was at an end.
Those hours of night! Varge fought it slowly out—and slowly his splendid mental constitution rallied—steadily the fine reason, the equipoise of the man gained strength; and turbulence of spirit, if not dissipated, was subjected.
At times, even in his bitterest moments, he had been conscious of what had seemed an unmanly inconsistency in his rebellion against that to which he himself, of his own free will, had elected to submit; and this, indeed, had been a powerful factor in his process of reconstruction. It had seemed a small, weak part to play that he should turn his face away and refuse to drink the cup he had so confidently volunteered to take because he found the first taste more bitter than he had thought. Then, by degrees, he had understood. It was not inconsistency—only that he was human, with human limitations, with human endurance—and heart and soul and brain had reeled and staggered before that which, momentarily, had been beyond his strength to support, that had turned his mind sick and robbed it of its sane virility. He had expected death, no other thing but that—and death he had been prepared to meet, he hoped calmly, bravely, patiently—but this was worse than death. Not that it would have altered his decision had he known this thing was before him, not that it would have held him back—that thought never came to him—but this was worse than death. For those around him, for even that weak, sickly, hollow-cheeked man of sixty years in the next cell, who coughed at nights, there was hope—at the end of the long, black tunnel glimmered the pinpoint of light on the other side, and as the years dragged by and the dark place was traversed, the pin-point grew and brightened with the Heaven-given sunlight of freedom—for them. For him, it was all blackness and there was no guiding, inspiriting light, and he must move in the darkness, stumbling, feeling with his hands his way along against the wall—for life.
Twice, at two o'clock in the morning—neither clock nor timepiece told him the hour—he had risen up in his cot and the face of Harold Merton had been before him. It had swept him with an all-engulfing passion that racked him to his soul, and his finger-tips had bled as they dug into the stone wall of his cell and the sweat had poured from his forehead. Twice this happened before he conquered it—and he conquered it only then with that other face, her face—the face of Mrs. Merton.
Gradually Varge found himself, in his own strong, big way—chiselling with soul-wrung bloody sweat from the fearful flint of his surroundings the laws by which he could best govern himself.
And from him first, as a dangerous, fatal thing, he put all thought of Harold Merton; and quiet control and patience came to lessen the misery that rebellion could but nourish. He forced himself to see the life around him, the conditions, the environment, not with the eyes of one who was part of it, who wore a convict's stripes, not with the eyes of guilt—but with the eyes of innocence. It was a place of punishment—and it was just. But, too, as one who understood too well the hungry eyes that stared from out of strained white faces, as one who lived their life and wore their stripes and knew their gall and bitterness, he saw their side as well; and pity for the wretched souls around him stole into his heart, and grew as the days went by. Endorsement he could never give them—they were guilty men, hard and vicious for the most part, unreclaimed, and it was right and it was just that they should be there; but pity, sympathy, was now where once there had been aversion and repugnance. Great heart of Varge, so heavily weighted, so nearly broken—there was room there for compassion for others!
"Seven-seven-seven," said Twisty Connors, and he leaned in close, furtive, confidence toward Varge across the workbench in the carpenter shop. "Say, take it from me, youse are de lucky one. Youse are a lifer, ain't youse? Well, mine's ten spaces; but say, so help me, I'd swop wid youse quick. Any guy dat can pull dat number in de bull-pen lottery don't lose, an' he's got de luck wid him fer fair." Twisty Connors dropped his already low, guarded tones to a whisper. "Say, mabbe there's something I'll let youse in on one of these days if—" Twisty Connors' shrewd, cunning, pinched little face drew suddenly back; he cast a sullen look sideways and slunk away.
Wenger, the guard, had taken Twisty's place—he looked at Varge for nearly a minute before he spoke, and there was a half-sneer, half-threat upon his curled lips.
"We've got something for them that haven't any good-conduct time to lose," he snarled. "I marked you that first day—remember? I ain't surprised to see you making up with Twisty—he's the worst we've got. Keep on, and I'll get you—understand?"
But Varge's eyes, dropped to his jacket, were studying speculatively the three black figures stamped across one of the wide grey stripes and he made no answer.
Wenger's cane fell across the bench with an ugly slap.
"D'ye hear?" he snapped roughly.
"Yes," said Varge.
"Sir!" prompted Wenger viciously.
"Sir," said Convict Number 777.
And Wenger, with a short-flung, brutal laugh, turned on his heel and walked away.