Странник по звездам / The Star-Rover

And hour by hour, in the dark dungeons, our madness of torment grew. I suffered equally with the others from pain and thirst; but added to my suffering was the fact that I remained conscious to the sufferings of the others.

Don’t you see? Our truth, the very truth we told, was our damnation. When forty men told the same things, Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie could only conclude that our words were a lie.

It was winter. We had no blankets in the dungeons. In the end they gave us water. I shall skip the rest of what happened in the dungeons. 25 per cent of the forty have died in the succeeding six years.

After my five years in solitary, when they took me away from San Quentin for my trial, I saw Skysail Jack[21 - Skysail Jack – Брамсель Джек]. His hair had turned white. He was prematurely old. His cheeks were sunken. His hands shook. He tottered as he walked. And his eyes blurred with tears as he recognized me.

“You’re a good one, Standing,” he said. “You told them nothing.”

“But I never knew, Jack,” I whispered back—I was compelled to whisper, for I had lost my voice.

They are going to take me out and hang me in a little while—no, not for killing Professor Haskell. I got life-imprisonment for that. They are going to hang me because I was found guilty of assault.

I believe I made a man’s nose bleed. I never saw it bleed, but that was the evidence. Thurston[22 - Thurston – Тэрстон], his name was. He was a guard at San Quentin. He weighed one hundred and seventy pounds and was in good health. I weighed under ninety pounds, and was blind as a bat from the long darkness.

I struck Thurston on the nose and made it bleed when he got in my way and tried to catch me. And so they are going to hang me. It is the written law of the State of California.

Life is strange. I warned you I had many things to write about. I shall now return to my narrative. They gave me twenty-four hours in the jacket to think everything over. Then I was brought before the Board a second time. What could I do? They told me I was a liar. They told me I was a hard case, a dangerous man, a moral degenerate, the criminal of the century. They told me many other things, and then they carried me away to the solitary cells. I was put into Number One cell. In Number Five lay Ed Morrell. In Number Twelve lay Jake Oppenheimer[23 - Jake Oppenheimer – Джек Оппенхеймер]. And he had been there for ten years. Ed Morrell had been in his cell only one year. He was serving a fifty-years’ sentence. Jake Oppenheimer was a lifer. And so was I.

The fools! As if they could throttle my immortality with their clumsy device of rope and scaffold! I shall walk, and walk again, oh, countless times, this earth.

Chapter V

It was very lonely at first, in solitary, and the hours were long. Time was marked by the regular changing of the guards, and by the alternation of day and night. Day was only a little light, but it was better than the all-dark of the night.

Never was the light strong enough to read by. Besides, there was nothing to read. One could only lie and think and think. And I was a lifer, and it seemed certain, that all the years of my life would be spent in the silent dark.

My bed was a thin and rotten tick of straw spread on the cell floor. And a thin and filthy blanket. There was no chair, no table—nothing but the tick of straw and the thin, aged blanket. For years I had slept five hours a night. But I became able to sleep ten hours, then twelve hours, and, at last, as high as fourteen and fifteen hours out of the twenty-four. But beyond that I could not go, and, perforce, was compelled to lie awake and think and think.

I was trying to do something. I counted numbers, I imagined chess-boards and played both sides of long games. I tried, and tried vainly, to split my personality into two personalities and to play one against the other. But ever I remained the one player.

And time was very heavy and very long. I played games with flies, with ordinary house-flies; and learned that they possessed a sense of play. For instance, lying on the cell floor, I established an arbitrary and imaginary line along the wall some three feet above the floor. When they rested on the wall above this line they were left in peace. When they passed that line I tried to catch them.

Of the dozen or more flies that lived with me, there was only one who did not care for the game. He refused steadfastly to play, and very carefully avoided the unsafe territory. He never played with the other flies either. He was strong and healthy.

Believe me, I knew all my flies. Oh, each was distinctly an individual—not merely in size and markings, strength, and speed of flight. They were differentiated in the mentality and temperament.

I knew the nervous ones, the phlegmatic ones. Moreover, I could tell in advance when any particular fly was beginning to play.

But the hours were very long in solitary. I could not sleep them all away. House-flies are house-flies, and I was a man, with a man’s brain; and my brain was trained and active. And there was nothing to do, and my thoughts ran abominably on in vain speculations.

The world was dead to me. No news of it filtered in. The history of science was making fast, and I was interested in a thousand subjects. The very thought of science just beyond the prison walls and in which I could take no part, was maddening. And in the meantime I lay there on my cell floor and played games with house-flies.

And yet all was not silence in solitary. One day I heard, at irregular intervals, faint, low tappings. Continually these tappings were interrupted by the snarling of the guard.

The matter was easy of explanation. I had known, as every prisoner in San Quentin knew, that the two men in solitary were Ed Morrell and Jake Oppenheimer. And I knew that these were the two men who tapped to each other and were punished for doing so.

The code they used was simple. There came a day when I listened to two clear sentences of conversation!

“Say—Ed—what—would—you—give—right—now—for—the—paper—and—tobacco” asked the one who tapped from farther away.

I nearly cried out in my joy. Here was communication! Here was companionship! I listened eagerly, and I heard Ed Morrell’s reply:

“I—would—give—twenty—hours—of—staying—in—the—jacket—for—that.”

Then came the snarling interruption of the guard: “Stop it, Morrell!”

The tapping ceased, and that night I tapped,

“Hello.”

“Hello, stranger,” Morrell tapped back; and, from Oppenheimer, “Welcome to our city.”

They were curious to know who I was, how long I was condemned to solitary, and why I had been so condemned. It was a great day, for the two lifers had become three.

To my surprise—yes, to my elation—both my fellow-prisoners knew me as an incorrigible. I had much to tell them of prison events and of the outside world. As they told me, news occasionally dribbled into solitary by way of the guards, but they had had nothing for a couple of months. The present guards on duty in solitary were particularly stupid.

How we talked that night! Sleep was very far from our eyes. In the morning the guards reported much tapping during the night, and we paid for it; for, at nine, came Captain Jamie with several guards to lace us into the torment of the jacket. Until nine the following morning, for twenty-four straight hours, laced and helpless on the floor, without food or water, we paid the price for speech.

Oh, our guards were brutes! Hard guards make hard prisoners. We continued to talk, and, on occasion, to be jacketed for punishment. Night was the best time: we often talked all night long.

Night and day were one with us who lived in the dark. We could sleep any time. We told one another much of the history of our lives, and for long hours Morrell and I have lain silently, while Oppenheimer slowly spelled out his life-story. They called Jake Oppenheimer the “Human Tiger.” But I found in Jake Oppenheimer all the cardinal traits of right humanness. He was faithful and loyal. He was brave. He was patient. He was capable of self-sacrifice. And he had a splendid mind. A lifetime in prison, ten years of it in solitary, had not dimmed his brain.

Morrell, a true comrade, too had a splendid brain. And here at the end of my days, reviewing all that I have known of life, I think that strong minds are never docile. The stupid men, the fearful men—these are the men who make model prisoners. I thank all gods that Jake Oppenheimer, Ed Morrell, and I were not model prisoners.

Chapter VI

To be able to forget means sanity. To remember everything means obsession, lunacy. So the problem I faced in solitary was the problem of forgetting. When I gamed with flies, or played chess with myself, or talked with my knuckles, I partially forgot. What I desired was entirely to forget.

There were the boyhood memories of other times and places. Sometimes solitary life-prisoners resurrected and looked upon the sun again. Then why could not these other-world memories of the boy resurrect?

But how? Hypnotism should do it. But first I must tell how, as a boy, I had had these other-world memories.

Let me narrate just one incident. It was up in Minnesota on the old farm. I was nearly six years old. A missionary, returned from China to the United States, spent the night in our house. It was in the kitchen just after supper, as my mother was helping me undress for bed, and the missionary was showing photographs of the Holy Land.

I cried out at sight of one of the photographs and looked at it, first with eagerness, and then with disappointment. It seemed most familiar. Then it seemed strange.

“The Tower of David,” the missionary said to my mother.

“No!” I cried with great positiveness.

“You mean that isn’t its name?” the missionary asked.

I nodded.

“Then what is its name, my boy?”

“Its name is…” I began, then concluded lamely, “I forget.”