CHAPTER XIII
Lydia and her guard arrived at the prison early in the evening. She had been travelling all through the hot, bright September day. For the first hour she had been only aware of the proximity of the guard, of the crowded car, the mingled smell of oranges and coal smoke, the newspaper on the floor, trodden by every foot, containing probably an account of her departure for her long imprisonment. Then, her eyes wandering to the river, she suddenly remembered that it would be years before she saw mountains and flowing water again. Perhaps she would never see them again.
During the previous winter she had gone with Benny and Mrs. Galton to visit a prison in a neighboring state—a man's prison. It was considered an unfortunate example. Scenes from that visit came back to her in a series of pictures. A giant negro highwayman weaving at an immense loom with a heavy, hopeless regularity. Black, airless punishment cells—"never used nowadays," the warden had said lightly, and had been corrected by a low murmur from the keeper; two of them were in use at the moment. The tiers of ordinary cells, not so very much better, with their barred loopholes. And the smells—the terrible prison smells. At their best, disinfectant and stale soap; at worst—Lydia never knew that it was possible to remember a smell as she now remembered that one. But most of all she remembered the chalky pallor of some of the prisoners, some obviously tubercular, others twitching with nervous affections. She doubted coolly if many people were strong enough to go through years of that sort of thing.
So she would look at the river as if she might never see it again.
They were already in the Highlands, and the hills on the eastern side—her side of the river—were throwing a morning shadow on the water, while across the way the white marble buildings at West Point shone in the sunlight. Storm King with its abrupt bulk interposed itself between the two sections of new road—the road which Lydia had so much desired to see finished. She and Bobby had had a plan to motor along it to the Emmonses some day—Newburgh. There was a hotel there where she had stopped once for luncheon on her way to Tuxedo from somewhere or other. Then presently the bridge at Poughkeepsie, and then the station at which she had got out when she had spent Sunday with the Emmonses, the day Evans had been arrested and had confessed to that man There was the very pillar she had waited beside while the chauffeur looked up her bags. Now the river began to narrow, there were marshy islands in it, and huge shaky ice houses along the brink. It all unrolled before her like a picture that she was never going to see again. Then Albany, set on its hills, and the train, turning sharply, rumbled over the bridge into the blackened station. Almost everybody in the car got out here, for the train stopped some time; but she and her guard remained sitting silently side by side. Then presently they were going on again, through the beautiful wide fertile valley of the Mohawk They were getting near, very near. She felt not frightened but physically sick. She wondered if her hair would be cut short. Of course it would. It seemed to her like an indignity committed by O'Bannon's own hand.
It was dark when they reached the station, so dark that she could not get a definite idea of anything but the great wall of the prison, and the clang of the unbarring of the great gate. Later she came to know the doorway with its incongruous beauty—the white door with its fanlight and side windows, and two low stairways curving up to it, and, above, the ironwork porch, supported on square ironwork columns of a leaf pattern, suggestive somehow of an old wistaria vine. But now she knew nothing between the gate and the opening of the front door.
She entered what might have been the wide hall of an old-fashioned and extraordinarily bare country house. A wide stairway rose straight before her, and wide, old-fashioned doors opened formally to left and right.
She was taken into the room at the right—the matron's room. While her name and age and crime were being registered she stood staring straight before her where bookshelves ran to the ceiling. She could recognise familiar bindings—the works of Marion Crawford and Mrs. Humphry Ward.
Calm brown-eyed women seemed to surround her, but she would not even look at them. Their impersonal kindness seemed to be founded on the insulting knowledge of her utter helplessness. They chatted a little with the guard who had brought her. Was the train late? Well, not as bad as last time.
She wondered how soon they would cut her hair.
After a little while she was taken through a long corridor directly to a spacious bathroom. Her clothes, wrapped in a sheet, were borne away. At this Lydia gave a short laugh. It pleased her as a sign that the routine in her case was palpably ridiculous—to take away her things as if they were infected. She was given a bath, a nightgown of most unfriendly texture was handed to her, and presently she was locked in her cell—still in possession of her hair.
She felt like an animal in a trap—could imagine herself running along the floor smelling at cracks for some hope of escape, with that strange head motion, up and down, up and down, of a newly caged animal.
More even than the locks and bolts, she minded the open grille in the door, like an eye through which she might at any moment of the day or night be spied upon. At every footstep she prepared herself to meet with a defiant stare the eyes of an inspector. The cell was hardly a cell, but a room larger than most hall bedrooms. The bed had a white cover; so had the table; and the window, though barred, was large. But this made no impression on Lydia. She was conscious of being locked in. Only her pride and her hard common sense kept her from beating at the door with her bare hands and making one of those screaming outbreaks so familiar to prison officials.
She who had never been coerced was now to be coerced in every action, surrounded everywhere by symbols of coercion. She who had been so intense an individualist that she had discarded a French model if she saw other women wearing it was now to wear a striped gingham dress of universal pattern. She whose competent white hands had never done a piece of useful work was sentenced to not less than three or more than seven years of hard labor. What would that be—hard labor? The vision of that giant negro working hopelessly at his loom was before her all night long.
All night long she wandered up and down her cell, now and then laying her hand on the door to assure herself of the incredible fact that it was locked. Only for a few minutes at dawn she fell asleep, forgetting the catastrophe, the malignant fate that had overtaken her, and woke imagining herself at home.
When her cell door was unlocked she stepped out into the same corridor along which she had passed the night before. She found it a blaze of sunlight. Great patches of sunlight fell in barred patterns on the boards of the floor, scrubbed as white as the deck of a man-of-war. Remembering the gloomy granite loopholes of her imagination, this sun seemed insolently bright.
The law compels every prisoner, unless specially exempted, to spend an hour a day in school. Lydia's examination was satisfactory enough to exempt her, but she was set to work in the schoolroom, giving out books, helping with papers, erasing the blackboards, collecting the chalk and erasers. In this way the whole population of the prison—about seventy-five women—passed before her in the different grades. She might have found interest and opportunity, but she was in no humor to be coöperative.
She sat there despising them all, feeling her own essential difference—from the bright-eyed Italian girl who had known no English eighteen months before and was now so industrious a student, to the large, calm, unbelievably good-tempered teacher. The atmosphere of the room was not that of a prison school but of a kindergarten. That was what annoyed Lydia—that these women seemed to like to learn. They spelled with enthusiasm—these grown women. Up and down pages they went, spelling "passenger" and "transfer" and "station"—it was evidently a lesson about a trolley car. Was she, Lydia Thorne, expected to join joyfully in some such child-like discipline? In mental arithmetic the competition grew keener. Muriel, a soft-voiced colored girl, made eight and seven amount to thirteen. The class laughed gayly. Lydia covered her face with her hands.
"Oh," she thought, "he might better have killed me than this!"
It seemed to her that this terrible impersonal routine was turning on her like a great wheel and grinding her into the earth. What incredible perversity it Was that no one—no prisoner, no guard, not even the clear-eyed matron—would see the obvious fact that she was not a criminal as these others were.
Had O'Bannon's power reached even into the isolation of prison and dictated that she should be treated like everyone else—she who was so different from these uneducated, emotional, unstable beings about her?
It was her former maid, Evans, who destroyed this illusion. The different wards of the prison ate separately; and as Evans was not in her ward they did not meet during the day. They met in the hour after tea, before the prisoners were locked in their cells for the night; an hour when in the large hall they were allowed to read and talk and sew and tat—tatting was very popular just then.
Lydia had sunk into a rocking-chair. She could not fix her mind on a book, and she did not know how to sew or tat, and talk for talk's sake had never been one of her amusements. She was thinking "One day has gone by out of perhaps seven years. In seven years I shall be thirty-three," when she felt some one approaching her, and looking up she saw it was Evans.
Evans, in a striped cotton, did not look so different from the lady's maid of the old days, except, as Lydia noticed with vague surprise, she had put on weight. She came with the hurried walk that made her skirts flip out at her heels—the same walk with which she used to come when she was late to dress Lydia for dinner. She almost expected to hear the familiar, "What will you wear, miss?" A dozen memories flashed into her mind—Evans polishing her jewels in the sunlight, Evans locked in the disordered bedroom refusing her confidence to everyone, and then collapsing and confessing to "that man."
She looked away from the approaching figure, hoping the girl would take the hint; but no, Evans was drawing up a chair with something of the manner of a hostess to a new arrival.
"Oh, Evans!" was Lydia's greeting, very much in her old manner.
"You'd better call me Louisa here—I mean, it's first names we use," said Evans.
The fact had already been called to her former employer's attention by Muriel, who had done nothing but call her Lydia in a futile effort to be friendly. She steeled herself to hear it from Evans, who, however, managed to avoid it. She gossiped of the prison news, and tried to cheer and help this newcomer with whatever wisdom she had acquired. Lydia neither moved nor answered nor again looked up.
"As the matron says," Evans ran on, "the worst is over when you get here. It's the trial and the sentence and the journey that's worst. After a week or so you'll begin to get used to it."
Lydia's nostrils trembled.
"I shall never get used to it," she said. "I don't belong here. What I did was no crime."
There was a short pause. Lydia waited for Evans' cordial agreement to what seemed a self-evident assertion. None came. Instead she said gently, as she might have explained to a child, "Oh, miss, they all think that!"
"Think what?"
"That what they did was no real harm—that they were unjustly condemned. There isn't one here who won't tell you that. The worse they are the more they think it."
Lydia had looked up from her contemplation of the gray rag rug. No sermon could have stopped her as short as that—the idea that she was exactly like all the other inmates. She protested, more to herself than to Evans.
"But it is different! What I did was an accident, not a deliberate crime."
Evans smiled her old, rare, gentle smile.
"But the law says it was a crime."
Horrible! Horrible but true! Lydia was to find that every woman there felt exactly as she did; that she was a special case; that she had done nothing wrong; that her conviction had been brought about by an incompetent lawyer, a vindictive district attorney, a bribed jury, a perjured witness. The first thing each of them wanted to explain was that she—like Lydia—was a special case.
The innocent-looking little girl who had committed bigamy. "Isn't it to laugh?" said she. "Gee, when you think what men do to us! And I get five years for not knowing he was dead! And what harm did I do him anyway?"
And the gaunt elderly stenographer who had run an illicit mail-order business for her employers. One of them had evidently occupied her whole horizon, taking the place of all law, moral and judicial.
"He said it was positively legal," she kept repeating, believing evidently that the judge and jury had been pitifully misinformed.
And there was the stout middle-aged woman with sandy hair and a bland competent manner—she was competent. She had made a specialty of real-estate frauds.
"I was entirely within the law," she said, as one hardly interested to argue the matter.
And there were gay young mulatto girls and bright-eyed Italians, who all said the same thing—"everyone does it; only the other girl squealed on me"—and there were the egotists, who were never going to get into this mess again. Some girls had to steal for a living; they had brains enough to go straight. Even the woman who had attempted to kill her husband felt she had been absolutely within her rights and after hearing her story Lydia was inclined to agree with her.
Only Evans seemed to feel that her sentence had been just.
"No, it wasn't right what I did," she said, and she stood out like a star, superior to her surroundings. She only was learning and growing in the terrible routine. It soon began to seem to Lydia that this little fool of a maid of hers was a great person. Why?
Locked in her cell from dark to daylight, Lydia spent much of the time in thinking. Like a great many people in this world, she had never thought before. She had particularly arranged her life so she should not think. Most people who think they think really dream. Lydia was no dreamer. She lacked the romantic imagination that makes dreams magical. Clear-sighted and pessimistic when she looked at life, the reality had seemed hideous, and she looked away as quickly as possible, looked back to the material beauty with which she had surrounded herself and the pleasant activities always within reach. Now, cut off from pleasure and beauty, it seemed to her for the first time as if there were a real adventure in having the courage to examine the whole scheme of life. Its pattern could hardly be more hideous than that of every day.
What was she? What reason had she for living? What use could life be put to? What was the truth?
A verse she could not place kept running through her head:
Quand j'ai connu la Vérité,
J'ai cru que c'était une amie;
Quand je l'ai comprise et sentie,
J'en étais déjà dégoûté.
Et pourtant elle est éternelle,
Et ceux qui se sont passés d'elle
Ici-bas ont tout ignoré.
She had been deliberately ignorant of much of life—of everything.
She went through a period of despair, all the worse because, like a face in a nightmare, it was featureless. It was despair, not over the fact that she was in prison but over the whole scheme of the universe, the futile hordes of human beings living and hoping and failing and passing away.
Despair paralyzed her bodily activities. Her mind, even her giant will, failed her. She could neither sleep nor eat, and after a week of it was taken to the hospital. The rumor ran through the prison that she was going mad—that was the way it always began. She lay in the hospital two days, hardly moving. Her face seemed to have shrunk and her eyes to have grown large and fiery. The doctor came and talked to her. She would not answer him; she would not meet his gaze; she would do nothing but draw long unnatural breaths like sighs.
In the room next to her there was a mother with a six-months-old baby. Lydia at the best of times had never been much interested in babies, though all young animals made a certain appeal to her. Her friends' babies, swaddled and guarded by nurses, lacked the spontaneous charm of a kitten or a puppy. This baby, however—Joseph his name was, and he was always so referred to—was different. He spent a great deal of time alone, sitting erect in his white iron crib. In spite of the conditions of his birth, he was calm, pink-cheeked and healthy. The first day that Lydia was up she glanced at him as she passed the door. He gave her somehow the impression of leading a life apart. At first she only used to stare at him from the doorway; then she ventured in, leaned on the crib, offered him a finger to which he clung, invented a game of clapping of hands, and was rewarded by a toothless smile and a long complicated gurgle of delight.
The sound was too much for Lydia—the idea that the baby was glad to be starting out on the tortured adventure of living. She went back to her own room in tears, weeping not for her own griefs but because all human beings were so infinitely pathetic.
The next day, Anna, the mother, came in while she was bending over the crib. Lydia knew her story, the common one—the story of a respectable, sheltered girl falling suddenly, wildly in love with a handsome boy, and finding, when after a few months he wearied of her, that she had never been his wife—that he was already married.
Lydia looked at the neat, blond, spectacled woman beside her. It was hard to imagine her murdering anyone. She seemed gentle, vague, perhaps a little defective. Later in their acquaintance she told Lydia how she had done it. She had not minded his perfidy so much, until he told her that she had known all along they weren't married—that she'd done it with her eyes open—that she had been "out for a good time." He was a paperhanger among other things, and a great pair of shears had been lying on the table. The first thing she knew they were buried in his side.
Lydia could not resist asking her whether she regretted what she had done.
The girl considered. "I think it was right for him to die," she said, but she was sorry about Joseph. In a little while the baby would be taken from her and put into a state institution. She was maternal—primitively maternal—and her real punishment was not imprisonment but separation from her child. Lydia saw this without entirely understanding it.
The girl had said to her: "I suppose you can't imagine killing anyone?"
Lydia assured her that she could—oh, very easily. She went back to her room thinking that she was more a murderess at heart than this girl, who was now nothing but a mother.
When she came out of the hospital she was not put back at the schoolroom work but was sent to the kitchen. This was an immense tiled room which gave the impression to those who first entered it of being entirely empty. Then the eye fell on a row of copper containers—three of them as tall as she—one for tea, one for coffee, one for hot water, and three smaller pots, round like witches' caldrons, for the cooking of cereals and meats and potatoes. The baking was done in an adjacent alcove. There Lydia was put to work. Gradually the process began to interest her—the mixing of the dough and the baking of dozens of loaves at a time in a great oven with rotating shelves in it. The oven, like all ovens, had its caprices, dependent upon the amount of heat being used by the rest of the institution. Lydia set herself to master the subject. A certain strain of practical competence in her had never before had its expression.