The inmates of the home, or the members of that family, as the sainted woman who established and superintended the place considered these men, were expected to contribute toward the expense of the home what it actually cost to keep them. During the hard winters of 1894 and 1895 able-bodied men by thousands were vainly seekingwork and awaiting their turn in the breadline at the end of a fruitless day, while Peter Belden, with his right arm useless, by seizing every chance to earn small amounts, and by strictest self-denial, contrived to meet the bare needs of his life. Once or twice for a few days he could not do this, but the superintendent of the home tided him over these breaks; and I knew from her that Belden was unflagging in his effort to make his expenses. That this was far from easy is shown by the following extract from a letter written in the winter of 1895:
"I am in pretty good health, thank you, but I have had a hard, hard time. Do the very best I can I can't get ahead; yesterday I had to borrow a dollar from the home. Still I am pegging away, day in and day out, selling note paper. I have felt like giving up in despair many times these last few months. Asomething, however, tells me to keep on. You have kindly asked me if I needed clothing. Yes, thank you, I need shoes and stockings and I haven't money to buy them. Now, dear friend, don't spend any money in getting these things for me; I shall be glad and thankful for anything that has been used before."
As financial prosperity gradually returned, making the ends meet became easier to Belden. Among his round of note-paper customers he established friendly relations and was able to enlarge his stock of salable articles, and he won the confidence of two large concerns that gave him goods on the instalment plan. At this time the superintendent of the home wrote me:
"I am deeply interested in Peter Belden, for he has been a good, honest, industrious man ever since he came to us. I want to tell you that your kindly efforts are fully appreciated by him. He is earnestly working up in a business way, and all who have anything to do with him as a man have confidence in him."
Belden's interests, too, began to widen and his frequent letters to me at this time are like moving pictures, giving glimpses of interiors of various homes and of contact with all sorts of people—a sympathetic Jewish woman, a brilliant Catholic bishop, a fake magnetic healer and spiritualistic fraud. He even approached the celebrated Dean Hole at the conclusion of a lecture in order to secure the dean's autograph, which he sent me; and he had interesting experiences with various other characters. He was frequently drawn intoreligious discussions, but firmly held his ground that creeds or lack of creeds were nothing to him so long as one was good and helpful to others. This simple belief was consistent with his course of action. Pity dwelt ever in his heart, and I do not believe that he ever slighted a chance to give the helping hand. He did not forget the prisoners left behind in the penitentiary where he had been confined, sending them magazines and letters, and messages through me. In one of his letters I find this brief incident, so characteristic of the man as I have known him:
"While I was canvassing to-day I saw a poor blind dog— It was a very pitiful sight. He would go here a little and there a little, moving backward and forward. The poor thing did not know where he was, for he was blind as could be, and not only blind but lame also. Something struck me when I saw him; I said to myself, 'I am crippled but I might be like this poor dog some day; who can tell? I certainly shall do what I can for him.'
"I could not take him home with me but I did the next best thing, for I took him from the pack of boys who began chasing him and gave him to a woman who was looking out of a windowevidently interested and sympathetic; she promised to care for him."
In the hundreds of letters written me by Belden I do not find a line of condemnation or even of harsh criticism of any one, although he shares the prejudice common to men of his class against wealthy church-members. Not that he was envious of their possessions, but, knowing too well the cruelty and the moral danger of extreme poverty and ready to spend his last dollar to relieve suffering, he simply could not conceive how it was possible for a follower of Christ to accumulate wealth while sweat-shops and child labor existed.
At this period of Belden's life his knowledge of mathematics afforded him great pleasure, and it brought him into prominence in the newspaper columns given to mathematical puzzles, where "Mr. Belden" was quoted as final authority. Numerous were the newspaper clippings enclosed in his letters to me, and I have before me an autograph note to Belden from the query editor of a prominent paper, in which he says:
"Your solution of the problem is a most ingenious and mathematically learned analysis of the question presented, and highly creditable to your talent."
This recognition of superiority in the realm of his natural gift and passion was precious indeed to Belden, but he was extremely sensitive in regard to his past and avoided contact and acquaintance with those who might be curious about it. And to be known as an inmate of the home was to be known as an ex-convict.
This maimed, ex-convict life he must bear to the end: only outside of that could he meet men as their equal; and so he guarded his incognito, but not altogether successfully.
Once he made the experiment of going to a neighboring city and trying to make some commercial use of his mathematics, but he could not gain his starting-point. He had no credentials as teacher, and while he might have been valuable as an expert accountant his disadvantages were too great to be overcome.
More and more frequently as the years passed came allusions to loss of time through illness. His faithful friend, the superintendent of the home, had passed to her reward, and the home as Belden had known it was a thing of the past.
Life was becoming a losing game, a problem too hard to be solved, when tubercular tendencies of long standing developed and Belden became acharge on some branch of the anti-tuberculosis movement, where he spent a summer out of doors. Here he frankly faced the fact of the disease that was developing, and characteristically read all the medical works on the subject that the camp afforded, determined to make a good fight against the enemy. He seemed to find a sort of comfort in bringing himself into companionship with certain men of genius who had fought the same foe; he mentions Robert Louis Stevenson, Chopin, and Keats, and, more hopefully, others who were finally victorious over the disease.
With the approach of cold weather it was thought best to send Belden to a warmer climate; arrangements were made accordingly, and he was given a ticket to a far distant place where it was supposed he would have a better chance of recovery. There for a time he rallied and grew stronger, but only to face fresh hardships. He was physically incapable of earning a living, and it was not long before he became a public charge and was placed in an infirmary for old men; for more than fifty years of poverty and struggle with fate had left the traces of a lifetime on the worn-out body. But the "something" which he felt told him to keep on through many hardshipsdoes not desert him now, and the old spirit of determination to make the best of things holds out still. His letters show much the same habit of observation as formerly; bits of landscape gleam like pictures through some of his pages, and historical associations in which I might be interested are gathered and reported. His one most vital interest at present seems to be the production of this book, as he firmly believes that no one else can "speak for the prisoners" as the writer.
It seems that even Death itself, "who breaks all chains and sets all captives free," cannot be kind to Peter Belden, and delays coming, through wearisome days and more wearisome nights. But at last, when the dark curtain of life is lifted, we can but trust that a happier fortune awaits him in a happier country.
At the time of my first visit to the penitentiary of my own State the warden surprised me by saying: "Among the very best men in the prison are the 'life' men, the men here for murder."
How true this was I could not then realize, but as in time I came to know well so many of these men the words of the warden were fully confirmed.
The law classes the killing of one person by another under three heads: murder in the first degree; murder in the second degree; and manslaughter. The murder deliberately planned and executed constitutes murder in the first degree; and for this, in many of our States, the penalty is still capital punishment; otherwise, legal murder deliberately planned and officially executed, the penalty duplicating the offence in general outline. This is the popular conception of fitting the punishment to the crime; and its continuance ignores the obvious truth that, so long as the law justifies and sets the example of taking life undergiven circumstances, so long will the individual justify himself in taking life under circumstances which seem to him to warrant doing so; the individual simply takes the law into his own hands. War and the death penalty are the two most potent sources of mental suggestion in the direction of murder.
In every execution within the walls of a penitentiary the suggestion of murder is sown broadcast among the other convicts, and is of especial danger to those mentally unsound. As long as capital punishment is upheld as necessary to the protection of society each State should have its State executioner; and executions should take place at the State capital in the presence of the governor and as many legislators as may be in the city. In relegating to the penitentiary the ugly office of Jack Ketch we escape the realization of what it all is—how revolting, how barbarous—and we throw one more horror into the psychic atmosphere of prison life.
Several factors have combined to hold the death penalty so long on the throne of justice. Evolution has not yet eliminated from the human being the elementary savage instinct of bloodthirstiness, so frightfully disclosed in therevolting rush of the populace eager to witness the public executions perpetrated in France in the present century; public executions in defiance of the established fact that men hitherto harmless have gone from the sight of an execution impelled to kill some equally harmless individual.
Many good men and women, ignoring the practical effect of anything so obscure as "suggestion," honestly believe that fear of the death penalty has a restraining influence upon the criminal class. In those States and countries which have had the courage to abolish the death penalty the soundness of the "deterrent effect" theory is being tested; statistics vary in different localities but the aggregate of general statistics shows a decrease in murders following the abolition of the death penalty.
A silent partner in the support of capital punishment is the general assumption that the murderer is a normal and a morally responsible human being. Science is now leading us to a clearer understanding of the relation between the moral and the physical in human nature, and we are beginning to perceive that complex and far-reaching are the causes, the undercurrents, the abnormal impulses which come to the surfacein the act of murder. Some years ago in England, upon the examination of the brains of a successive number of men executed for murder, it was ascertained that eighty-five per cent of those brains were organically diseased. Granting that these men were criminally murderers, we must grant also that they were mentally unsound, themselves victims of disease before others became their victims. Where the moral responsibility lies, the Creator alone can know; perhaps in a crowded room of a foul tenement an overworked mother or a brutal father struck a little boy on the head, and the little brainwent wrong, some of those infinitesimal brain-cells related to moral conduct were crushed, and years afterward the effect of the cruel blow on the head of the defenceless child culminated in the murderous blow from the hand of this child grown to manhood. And back of the blow given the child stand the saloon and the sweat-shop and the bitter poverty and want which can change a human being into a brute. Saloons and sweat-shops flourish in our midst, and cruel is the pressure of poverty, and terrible in their results are the blows inflicted upon helpless children. When the State vigorously sets to work to remove or ameliorate the social conditionswhich cause crime there will be fewer lawless murderers to be legally murdered.
Time and again men innocent of the crime have been executed for murder. Everything is against a man accused of murder. The simple accusation antagonizes the public against the accused man. The press, which loves to be sensational, joins in the prosecution, sometimes also the pulpit. The tortures of the sweat-box are resorted to, that the accused may be driven to convict himself before being tried; and one who has no money may find himself convicted simply because he cannot prove his innocence—although the law professes to hold a man innocent until his guilt is proven.
For years I was an advocate of the death penalty as a merciful alternative to life imprisonment. Knowing that the certainty of approaching death may effect spiritual awakening and bring to the surface all that is best in a man; believing that death is the great liberator and the gateway to higher things; knowing that a man imprisoned for life may become mentally and spiritually deadened by the hopelessness of his fate, or may become so intent on palliating, excusing, or justifying his crime as to lose all sense of guilt, perhaps eventually to believe himself avictim rather than a criminal; knowing the unspeakable suffering of the man who abandons himself to remorse, and knowing how often the "life man" becomes a prey to insanity, in sheer pity for the prisoner I came to regard the death penalty as a merciful means of escape from an incomparably worse fate.
So far my point of view was taken only in relation to the prisoner for life. Later, when I had studied the subject more broadly, in considering the effect of the death penalty upon the community at large and as a measure for the protection of society, I could not escape the conviction that in the civilized world of to-day capital punishment is indefensible. Christianity, humanity, sociology, medical science, psychology, and statistics stand solid against the injustice and the unwisdom of capital punishment. Public sentiment, the last bulwark of the death penalty, is slowly but surely becoming enlightened, and the final victory of humanitarianism is already assured.
Throughout the United States the legal penalty for murder in the second degree is imprisonment for life; then follows the crime called manslaughter, when the act is committed inself-defence or under other extenuating circumstances; the penalty for which is imprisonment for a varying but limited term of years. Practically there is no definite line dividing murder in the second degree from manslaughter. A clever expert lawyer, whether on the side of prosecution or the defence, has little difficulty in carrying his case over the border in the one direction or the other. Money, and the social position of the accused, are important factors in adjusting the delicate balance between murder in the second degree and manslaughter.
Various are the pathways that lead to the illegal taking of life; terrible often the pressure brought to bear upon the man before the deed is done. Deadly fear, the fear common to humanity, has been the force that drove the hand of many a man to strike, stab, or shoot with fatal effect; while anger, righteous or unrighteous, the momentary impulse of intense emotional excitement to which we are all more or less liable, has gathered its host of victims and caused the tragic ruin of unnumbered men now wearing life away in our penitentiaries.
And terribly true it is that some of the "life" men are among the best in our prisons, the "life"men who are all indiscriminately called murderers. That some of them were murderers at heart and a menace to the community we cannot doubt; doubtless, also, some are innocent of any crime; and there are others for whom it would be better for all concerned if they were given liberty to-day.
It seems to be assumed that a man unjustly imprisoned suffers more than the one who knows that he has only himself to blame. Much depends upon the nature of the man. Given two men of equally sound moral nature, while the one with a clear conscience may suffer intensely, from the sense of outrage and injustice, from the tearing of the heart-strings and the injury to business relations, his mental agony can hardly equal that of the man whose heart is eaten out with remorse. The best company any prisoner can have is his own self-respect, the best asset of a bankrupt life. I have been amazed to see for how much that counts in the peace and hope, and the great power of patience which makes for health and gives strength for endurance.
I was deeply impressed with this fact in the case of one man. His name was Gay Bowers, a name curiously inconsistent with his fate, and, "life man" though he was, no one in that bigprison ever associated him with murder; no one who really looked into his face could have thought him a criminal. It was the only face I ever saw, outside of a book, that seemed chastened through sorrow; his gentle smile was like the faint sunshine of an April day breaking through the mists; and there was about the man an atmosphere of youth and springtime though he was near forty when we first met; but it was the arrested youth of a man to whom life seemed to have ended when he was but twenty-two.
Gay was country born and bred, loved and early married a country girl, and was known throughout the neighborhood as a hard-working, steady young fellow. He lived in a village near the Mississippi River, and one summer he went down to St. Louis on some business and returned by boat. On the steamboat a stranger, a young man of near his age, made advances toward acquaintance, and hearing his name exclaimed:
"Gay Bowers! why my name is Ray Bowers, and I'm looking for work. I guess I'll go to your town and we'll call each other cousins; perhaps we are related."
The stranger seemed very friendly and kept with Bowers when they reached the home town;there Ray found work and seemed all right for a while.
And here I must let Gay Bowers tell the rest of the story as he told it to me, in his own words as nearly as I can remember them. I listened intently to his low, quiet voice, but I seemed reading the story in his eyes at the same time, for the absolutely convincing element was the way in which Bowers was living it all over again as he unfolded the scene with a certain thrill in his tones. I felt as if I was actually witnessing the occurrence, so vividly was the picture in his mind transferred to mine.
"My wife and I had just moved into a new home that very day, we and our little year-old girl, and Ray had helped us in the moving and stayed to supper with us. After supper Ray said he must go, and asked me to go a piece with him as he had something to say to me.
"So I went along with him. Back of the house the road ran quite a way through deep woods. We were in the middle of the woods when Ray stopped and told me what he wanted of me. He told me that he had been a horse-thief over in Missouri, that his picture was in 'the rogues' gallery' in St. Louis over his own name, Jones;that it wasn't safe for him to be in Missouri, where he was 'wanted' and that he had got on the boat without any plans; but as soon as he saw me, a working, country man, he thought he might as well hitch on to me and go to my place. But he said he was tired of working; and farmer Smith had a fine pair of horses which he could dispose of if I would take them out of the barn into the next county. Ray wanted me to do this because of my good reputation. Everybody knew me and I was safe from suspicion; and he said we could make a lot of money for us both if I went into the business with him.
"All of a sudden I knew then that for some time I'd beenfeelingthat Ray wasn't quite square. There had been some little things—of course I said I wouldn't go in with him; and I don't know what else I said for I was pretty mad to find out what kind of a man he was and how he had fooled me. Perhaps I threatened to tell the police; anyway Ray said he would kill me before I had a chance to give him away if I didn't go into the deal with him, for then I wouldn't dare 'peach.' Still I refused.
"And then"—here a look of absolute terror came into Bowers's eyes—"then he suddenlystruck me a terrible blow and I knew I was in a fight for my life. He fought like the desperate man that he was. I managed to reach down and pick up a stick and struck out: I never thought of killing the man; it was just a blind fight to defend myself.
"But he let go and fell. When he did not move I bent over him and felt for his heart. I could not find it beating; but I could not believe he was dead. I waited for some sign of life but there was none. I was horror-struck and dazed; but I knew I could not leave him in the road where he had fallen, so I dragged him a little way into the woods. There I left him.
"I hurried back home to tell my wife what had happened; but when I opened the door my wife was sitting beside the cradle where the baby was. Cynthy was tired and sleepy with her day's work, and everything seemed so natural and peaceful I just couldn't tell her, and I couldn't think, or anything. So I told her she'd better go to bed while I went across the road to speak to her father.
"It wasn't more than nine o'clock then, and I found her father sitting alone smoking his pipe. He began to talk about his farm work. Hedidn't notice anything queer about me and I was so dazed-like that it all began to seem unreal to me. I tried once or twice to break into his talk and tell him, but I couldn't put the horror into words—I couldn't.
"Perhaps it wouldn't have made any difference if I had told him; anyway I didn't. When the body was found next morning of course they came right to our house with the story, for Ray had told folks that he was a relation of mine. I told just what had happened but it didn't count for anything—I was tried for murder and not given a chance to make any statement. Because I was well thought of by my neighbors they didn't give me the rope, but sent me here for life."
Bowers had been sixteen years in prison when I first met him. He had accepted his fate as an overwhelming misfortune, like blindness or paralysis, but never for a moment had he lost his self-respect, and he clung to his religion as the isle of refuge in his wrecked existence.
"Mailed in the armor of a pure intent" which the degradations of convict life could not penetrate, as the years passed he had achieved true serenity of spirit, and that no doubt contributed to his apparently unbroken health. His work wasnot on contract but in a shop where prison supplies were made, canes for the officers, etc. One day Bowers sent me a beautifully made cane, which I may be glad to use if I ever live to have rheumatism.
Bowers, like all life men, early laid his plans for a pardon and had a lawyer draw up a petition; but the difficulty in the case was that there wasn't a particle of evidence against the dead man excepting Bowers's own word. But Bowers's mind was set on establishing the truth of his statement regarding the character of the other man, and he saw only one way of doing this. Ray had said that his real name was Jones, and his photograph was in the rogues' gallery in St. Louis under the name of Jones. Now, if there was such a photograph in St. Louis Bowers determined to get it, and at last, after ten years, he obtained possession of the photograph, with the help of a lawyer, and again he looked upon the face of Ray, named Jones, with the record "horse-thief." The proven character of Jones did not alter the fact that he had been killed by Bowers; nor in that part of the country did it serve as a reason for release of Bowers; and the years went on the same as before.
Bowers's wife had not learned to write, but the baby, Carrie, grew into a little girl and went to school, and she wrote regularly to her father, who was very proud of her letters. When still a little girl she was taken into a neighbor's family. After a time the neighbor's wife died and Carrie not being equal to the work of the house her mother came to help out—so said Carrie's letters. And Bowers, who still cherished the home ties, was thankful that his wife and child were taken care of. Every night he prayed for them and always he hoped for the day when he could take them in his arms.
His letters to me were few as he wrote regularly to his daughter; but after he had been in prison eighteen years he wrote me the joyful news that he would be released in a few weeks, for his lawyer had proven a faithful friend. The letter was a very happy one written in December, and the warden had allowed Bowers to tinker up some little gifts to be sent to the wife and daughter. "They stand in a row before me as I am writing,and I think they are as beautiful as butterflies," his letter said.
On his release Bowers, now a man past forty, had to begin life over again. He had lost hisplace in his community, he had no money, but he had hope and ambition, and as a good chance was offered him in the penitentiary city he decided to take it and go right to work. He wrote his daughter that he would arrange for her and her mother to come to him, and there they would start a new home together.
Little did he dream of the shock awaiting him when the answer to that letter came, telling him that for several years his wife had been married to the man who had given Carrie a home. Both the man and the woman had supposed that when Bowers was sent to prison for life the wife was divorced and free to marry. She was hopeless as to her husband's release, and tired and discouraged with her struggle with poverty. Her brief married life had come to seem only a memory of her youth, and she was glad of the chance to be taken care of like other women, but a feeling of tenderness and pity for the prisoner had caused her to protect him from the knowledge of her inconstancy.
The second husband felt that to Bowers must be left the decision as to the adjustment of the tangled relationships, and Bowers wrote me that he had decided that the second husband had thestronger claim, as he had married the woman in good faith and made her happy; one thing he insisted upon, however—that if the present arrangement were to continue, his former wife must take her divorce from him and be legally married to the other man. And this was done.
To find himself another Enoch Arden was a hard blow to Bowers, but the years of work and poverty must have wrought such changes in the girl wife of long ago that she was lost to him forever; while the man who came out of that prison after eighteen years of patient endurance and the spiritual development that long acquaintance with grief sometimes brings was a different being from the light-hearted young farmer's boy that the girl had married. They must inevitably have become as strangers to each other.
With the daughter the situation was different. From childhood she had faithfully written to an imaginary father whom she could not remember, but with whom a real tie must have been formed through their letters; and Carrie had now come to be near the age of the wife he had left. The daughter was to come to him, and she must have found in the real father something even finer than her imagination could have pictured.
Gay Bowers had been a prisoner for those eighteen years, with never a criminal thought or intention. As human courts go he was not the victim of injustice nor could "society" be held in any way responsible. There was no apparent relation between his environment or his character and his tragic experience. It was like a Greek drama where Fate rules inexorable, but this fate was borne with the spirit of a Christian saint. What the future years held for him I do not know, since through carelessness on my part our correspondence was not kept up.
In another instance, with quite different threads, the hand of fate seemed to have woven the destiny of the man, but I was slow in perceiving that it was not merely the tragedy of the prison that was unfolding before me but the wider drama of life itself.
Generally speaking, among my prison acquaintance there was some correspondence between the personality of the man and his history. The prisoner who said frankly to me, "I always cheat a man when I can, because I know he would cheat me if he had the chance: 'tis diamond cut diamond," this man curiously but logically resembled a fox. And any one could see at a glance that Gay Bowers was a man in whom was no guile.
But no clew to the complex nature of Harry Hastings was to be found in his appearance. We had exchanged a number of letters before we met. He wrote intelligently with but an occasional slip in spelling, and seemed to be a man of fair education. He was in prison for life on the charge ofhaving shot in the street a woman of the streets; the man claimed innocence, but I never tried to unravel the case, as the principal witness for the defence had left the city where the shooting occurred, and there seemed to be no starting-point for an appeal for pardon. What the boy wanted of me—he was but little past twenty—was a channel through which he could reach the higher things of life. Passionate aspiration ran through all his letters, aspiration toward the true, the beautiful, and the good. He quoted Emerson and studied George Eliot—Romola, the woman, he criticised for being blinded to Tito's moral qualities by his superficial charms. He had a way of piercing to the heart of things and finding beauty where many others would have missed it. Music he loved above all else; and in music his memory was haunted by "The Coulin"—a wild, despairing cry of downtrodden Ireland, an air in which, some one has said, "Ireland gathered up her centuries of oppression and flung it to the world in those heart-breaking strains." It happened that I had never heard "The Coulin" except under my own fingers, and it struck me as a curious bit of the boy's make-up that this tragic music had become part of his mental endowment.He had heard it but once, played by a German musician. Barring glimpses of the world of music, the boy's life had been such as to exclude him from all the finer associations of life.
He had written me, in his second letter, that he was "coloured"; and he had given this information as if he were confessing a crime more serious even than murder. He really felt that he might be uncovering an impassable chasm between us. Race prejudices are against my principles, but I was taken aback when the writer of those interesting letters was materialized in the person of the blackest little negro I ever saw. "Black as the ace of spades," was my first thought. He had no father at that time but was devoted to his mother, who was an illiterate colored woman. As a growing boy he had gone to a horse-race and, fired with the ambition to become a horse-jockey, had hung around the racing-stables until his aptitude for the business attracted the horsemen. Harry was agile and fearless and of light weight, and when at last his ambition was attained he told me it was the proudest day of his life; and he felt that he had achieved glory enough to satisfy any one when the horse he rode as jockey won the race.
The associations of the race-track formed the school of those plastic years; and the thorn in the flesh was the nickname of "the little runt" by which he was known among the men. The consciousness of his stunted body and his black skin seemed seared upon his very heart, a living horror from which there was no escape. This, far more than his fate as a life prisoner, was the tragedy of his existence. Freedom he could hope for; but only death could release him from his black body. He did not despise the colored race; rather was he loyal to it; it was his individual destiny, the fact that his life was incased in that stunted black form that kept alive the sense of outrage. He hated to be known as "the little runt." He hated his coal-black skin.
Doubtless when free to mingle with colored people on the outside his other faculties came into play, for he had the darky love of fun and sense of humor; but the prison life cut him off from all that, and, the surface of his nature being stifled, what dormant strains of white ancestry might not have been aroused to activity? His skin was black, indeed; but his features told the story of the blending with another race. I could but feel that it was the mind of the white manthat suffered so in the body of the black—that in this prisoner the aristocrat was chained to the slave. The love of literature, the thirst for the higher things of life, had no connection with "Little Runt," the ignorant horse-jockey. Was the man dying of homesickness for the lost plane of life?
The theosophist would tell us that Harry Hastings might have been a reincarnation of some cruel slave-trader, merciless of the suffering he inflicted upon his innocent victims; and possibilities of the stirring of latent inherited memories are also suggested. Be that as it may, we cannot solve the problem of that life in which two streams of being were so clearly defined, where the blue blood was never merged in the black.
Harry's handwriting was firm, clear-cut, and uniform. I lent to a friend the most striking and characteristic of his letters, and I can give no direct quotations from them, as they were not returned; but writing was his most cherished resource, and he tells me that when answering my letters he almost forgot that he was a prisoner.
The terrible ordeal of life was mercifully short to Harry Hastings. When I saw him last, in the prison hospital, a wasted bit of humanity fastdrifting toward the shores of the unknown, with dying breath he still asserted his innocence; but he felt himself utterly vanquished by the decree of an adverse fate. To the mystery of death was left the clearing of the mystery of life.
It was Hiram Johnson who taught me what a smothering, ghastly thing prison life in America may be. One of the guards had said to me, "Hiram Johnson is a life man who has been here for years. No one ever comes to see him, and I think a visit would do him lots of good." The man who appeared in answer to the summons was a short, thick-set fellow of thirty-five or more, with eyes reddened and disabled by marble-dust from the shop in which he had worked for years. He smiled when I greeted him, but had absolutely nothing to say. I found that visit hard work; the man utterly unresponsive; answering in the fewest words my commonplace inquiries as to his health, the shop he worked in, and how long he had been there. Six months after I saw him again with exactly the same experience. He had nothing to say and suggested nothing for me to say. I knew only that he expected to see me when I came to the prison, and after making his acquaintance I could never disappoint one ofthose desolate creatures whose one point of contact with the world was the half-hour spent with me twice a year.
When I had seen the man some half-dozen times, at the close of an interview I said, in half-apology for my futile attempts to keep up conversation: "I'm sorry that I haven't been more interesting to-day; I wanted to give you something pleasant to think of."
"It has meant a great deal to me," he answered. "You can't know what it means to a man just to know that some one remembers he is alive. That gives me something pleasant to think about when I get back to my cell."
We had begun correspondence at the opening of our acquaintance, but rarely was there a line in his earlier letters to which I could make reply or comment. Mainly made up of quotations from the Old Testament, scriptural imprecations upon enemies seemed to be his chief mental resource. The man considered himself "religious," and had read very little outside his Bible, which was little more intelligible to him than the original Greek would have been; excepting where it dealt with denunciations.
In my replies to these letters I simply aimed togive the prisoner glimpses of something outside, sometimes incidents of our own family life, and always the assurance that I counted him among my prison friends, that "there was some one who remembered that he was alive." It was five or six years before I succeeded in extracting the short story of his life, knowing only that he had killed some one. The moral fibre of a man, and the sequence of events which resulted in the commission of a crime have always interested me more than the one criminal act. One day, in an unusually communicative mood, Johnson told me that as a child he had lost both parents, that he grew up in western Missouri without even learning to read, serving as chore-boy and farm-hand until he was sixteen, when he joined the Southern forces in 1863, drifting into the guerilla warfare. It was not through conviction but merely by chance that he was fighting for rather than against the South; it was merely the best job that offered itself and the killing of men was only a matter of business. Afterward he thought a good deal about this guerilla warfare as it related itself to his own fate, and he said to me:
"I was paid for killing men, for shooting on sight men who had never done me any harm.The more men I killed the better soldier they called me. When the war was over I killed one more man. I had reason this time, good reason. The man was my enemy and had threatened to kill me, and that's why I shot him. But then they called me a murderer, and shut me up for the rest of my life. I was just eighteen years old."
Such was the brief story of Johnson's life; such the teaching of war. In prison the man was taught to read; in chapel he was taught that prison was not the worst fate for the murderer; that an avenging God had prepared endless confinement in hell-fire for sinners like him unless they repented and propitiated the wrath of the Ruler of the Universe. And so, against the logic of his own mind, while religion apparently justified war, he tried to discriminate between war and murder and to repent of taking the one life which he really felt justified in taking; he found a certain outlet for his warlike spirit or his elemental human desire to fight, in arraying himself on God's side and against the enemies of the Almighty. And no doubt he found a certain kind of consolation in denouncing in scriptural language the enemies of the Lord.
But all this while in the depths of Johnson'snature something else was working; a living heart was beating and the sluggish mind was seeking an outlet. A gradual change took place in his letters; the handwriting grew more legible, now and again gleams of the buried life broke through the surface, revealing unexpected tenderness toward nature, the birds, and the flowers. Genuine poetic feeling was expressed in his efforts to respond to my friendship, as where he writes:
"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, whichI 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 andbelieve 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."
"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 andbelieve 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 itmustcome 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 expectationsthat "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 clemencyexcept 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 factof 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.
My interview with Johnson was undisturbed by any other presence, and he greeted me with no premonition of the meaning of the roll of white paper that I held. Very quietly our visit began; but when Johnson was quite at his ease, I asked: "Has anything been done about your case since I saw you last?" "Oh, no, nothing ever will be done for me! I've given up all hope."
"I had a talk with the governor about you yesterday, and he was willing to help you. He gave me this paper which you and I will look over together." I watched in vain for any look of interest in his face as I said this.
Slowly, aloud, I read the official words, Johnson's eyes following as I read; but his realization of the meaning of the words came with difficulty. When I had read the date of his releasewe both paused; as the light broke into his mind, he said:
"Then in January I shall be free"; another pause, while he tried to grasp just what this would mean to him; and then, "I shall be free. Now I can work and earn money to send you to help other poor fellows." That was his uppermost thought during the rest of the interview.
In the evening the Catholic chaplain, Father Cyriac, of beloved memory, came to me with the request that I have another interview with Johnson, saying: "The man is so distressed because in his overwhelming surprise he forgot to thank you to-day."
"He thanked me better than he knew," I replied.
But of course I saw Johnson again the next day; and in this, our last interview, he made a final desperate effort to tell me what his prison life had been. "Behind me were stone walls, on each side of me were stone walls, nothing before me but stone walls. And then you came and brought hope into my life, and now you have brought freedom, andI cannot find words to thank you." And dropping his head on his folded arms the man burst into tears, his whole body shakenwith sobs. I hope that I made him realize that there was no need of words, that when deep calleth unto deep the heart understands in silence.
Only yesterday, turning to my writing-desk in search of something else, I chanced across a copy of the letter I wrote to the governor after my interview with Johnson, and as it is still warm with the feelings of that never-to-be-forgotten experience, I insert it here:
"I cannot complete my Thanksgiving Day until I have given you the message of thanks entrusted to me by Hiram Johnson. At first he could not realize that the long years of prison life were actually to be ended. It was too bewildering, like a flood of light breaking upon one who has long been blind. And when he began to grasp the meaning of your gift the first thing he said to me was, 'Now I can work and earn money to send you for some other poor fellow.'
"Not one thought of self, only of the value of liberty as a means, at last, to do something for others. Howhardhe tried to find words to express his gratitude. It made my heart ache for the long, long years of repression that had made direct expression almost impossible; and in that thankfulness, so far too deep for words, I read,too, the measure of how terrible the imprisoned life had been. Thank heaven and a good governor, it will soon be over! Hiram Johnson has a generous heart and true, and he will be a good man. And it is beautiful to know that spiritual life can grow and unfold even under the hardest conditions."
What life meant to Johnson afterward I do not know; but I do know that he found home and protection with relatives on a farm, and the letters that he wrote me indicated that he took his place among them not as an ex-convict so much as a man ready to work for his living and entitled to respect. Being friendly he no doubt found friends; and though he was a man near fifty, perhaps the long-buried spirit of youth came to life again in the light of freedom. At all events, once more the blue skies were above him and he drew again the blessed breath of liberty. Although he never realized his dream of helping me to help others, I never doubted the sincerity of his desire to do so.
Mr. William Ordway Partridge, in "Art for America," says to us: "Let us learn to look upon every child face that comes before us as a possible Shakespeare or Michael Angelo or Beethoven. The artistic world is rejoicing over the discovery in Greece of some beautiful fragments of sculpture hidden far beneath thedébrisof centuries; shall we not rejoice more richly when we are able to dig down beneath the surface of the commonest child that comes to us from our great cities, and discover and develop that faculty in him which is to make him fit to live in usefulness with his fellow men? Seeking for these qualities in the child we shall best conserve, as is done in physical nature, the highest type, until we have raised all human life to a higher level."
I hope that some day Mr. Partridge will write a plea for elementary art classes in our prisons. For in every prison there are gifted men and boys whose special talents might be so trained anddeveloped as to change the channel of their lives. What chances our prisons have with these wards of the state, to discover and develop the individual powers that might make their owners self-respecting and self-supporting men!
We are doing this in our institutions for the feeble-minded and with interesting results, but in our prisons the genius of a Michael Angelo might be stifled—the musical gift of a Chopin doomed to eternal silence.
Mr. Partridge's belief in the latent possibilities in our common children went to my heart, because I had known Anton Zabrinski; and yet I can never think of Anton Zabrinski as a common child.
The story of his life is brief; but his few years enclosed the circle of childhood, youth, aspiration, hope, horror, tragedy, pain, and death; and all the beautiful possibilities of his outward life were blighted.
Anton's home was in the west side of Chicago, in that region where successive unpronounceable names above doors and across windows assure one that Poland is not lost but scattered.
In back rooms in the third story of the house lived the Zabrinski family, the father and motherwith Anton and his sister two years younger. The mother was terribly crippled from an accident in childhood, and was practically a prisoner in her home. Anton, her only son, was the idol of her heart.
When scarcely more than a child Anton began work tailoring. He learned rapidly, and when sixteen years old was so skilful a worker that he earned twelve dollars a week. This energy and skill, accuracy of perception and sureness of touch, gave evidence of a fine organization. His was an elastic, joyous nature, but his growth was stunted, his whole physique frail; sensitive and shy, he shrank with nervous timidity from contact with the stronger, rougher, coarser-fibred boys of the neighborhood. Naturally this served only to make Anton a more tempting target for their jokes.
Two of these boys in particular played upon his fears until they became an actual terror in his existence; though the boys doubtless never imagined the torture they were inflicting, nor dreamed that he really believed they intended to injure him. It happened one evening that Anton was going home alone from an entertainment, when these two boys suddenly jumped out from somehiding-place and seized him, probably intending only to frighten him. Frighten him they did, out of all bounds and reason. In his frantic efforts to get away from them Anton opened his pocket-knife and struck out blindly. But in this act of self-defence he mortally wounded one of the boys.
Anton Zabrinski did not go back to his mother that night; this gentle, industrious boy, doing the work and earning the wages of a man, had become, in the eye of the law, a murderer. I have written "in the eye of the law"; a more accurate statement would be "in the eye of the court," for under fair construction of the law this could only have been a case of manslaughter; but——
I once asked one of Chicago's most eminent judges why in clear cases of manslaughter so many times men were charged with murder and tried for murder. The judge replied: "Because it is customary in bringing an indictment to make the largest possible net in which to catch the criminal."
Anton Zabrinski had struck out with his knife in the mere animal instinct of self-defence. The real moving force of evil in the tragedy was the love of cruel sport actuating the larger boys—a passion leading to innumerable crimes. Were themoral origin of many of our crimes laid bare we should clearly see that the final act of violence was but a result—the rebound of an evil force set in motion from an opposite direction. It sometimes happens that it is the slayer who is the victim of the slain. But to the dead, who have passed beyond the need of our mercy, we are always merciful.
Had an able lawyer defended Anton he never would have been convicted on the charge of murder; but the family was poor, and, having had no experience with the courts, ignorantly expected fairness and justice. Anton was advised to plead guilty to the charge of murder, and was given to understand that if he did so the sentence would be light. Throwing himself upon "the mercy of the court," the boy pleaded "guilty." He was informed that "the mercy of the court" would inflict the sentence of imprisonment for life. It chanced that in the court-room another judge was present whose sense of justice, as well as of mercy, was outraged by this severity. Moved with compassion for the undefended victim he protested against the impending sentence and induced the presiding judge to reduce it to thirty years. Thirty years! A lifetime indeed to theimagination of a boy of seventeen. The crippled mother, with her heart torn asunder, was left in the little back room where she lived, while Anton was taken to Joliet penitentiary.
It did not seem so dreadful when first it came in sight—that great gray-stone building, with its broad, hospitable entrance through the warden house; but when the grated doors closed behind him with relentless metallic clang, in that sound Anton realized the death-knell of freedom and happiness. And later when, for the first night, the boy found himself alone in a silent, "solitary"[8]cell, then came the agonizing homesickness of a loving young heart torn from every natural tie. Actually but two hours distant was home, the little back room transfigured to a heaven through love and the yearning cry of his heart; but the actual two hours had become thirty years of prison in the future. The prison life itself was but a dumb, unshapen dread in his imagination. And the unmeaning mystery and cruelty and horror of his fate! Why, his whole life covered but seventeen years, of which memory could recall notmore than twelve; he knew they were years of innocence, and then years of faithful work and honest aims until that one night of horror, when frightened out of his senses he struck wildly for dear life. And then he had become that awful thing, a murderer, and yet without one thought of murder in his heart. If God knew or cared, how could he have let it all happen? And now he must repent or he never could be forgiven. And yet how could he repent, when he had meant to do no wrong; when his own quivering agony was surging through heart and mind and soul; when he was overwhelmed with the black irrevocableness of it all, and the sense of the dark, untrodden future? One night like that, it holds the sufferings of an ordinary lifetime.
We who have reached our meridian know that life means trial and disappointment, but to youth the bubble glows with prismatic color; and to Anton it had all been blotted into blackness through one moment of deadly fear.
When young convicts are received at Joliet penitentiary it is customary for the warden to give them some chance for life and for development physically and mentally. They are usually given light work, either as runners for the shopsor helpers in the kitchens or dining-rooms, where they have exercise, fresh air, and some variety in employment. Anton came to the prison when there was a temporary change of wardens, and it happened when he was taken from the "solitary" cell where he passed the first night that he was put to work in the marble-shop, a hard place for a full-grown man. He was given also a companion in his cell when working-hours were over.
As he became fully adjusted to prison life he learned a curious thing: on the outside crime had been the exception, a criminal was looked upon as one apart from the community; but in this strange, unnatural prison world it was crime which formed the common basis of equality, the tie of brotherhood.
And again, the tragedy of his own fate, which had seemed to him to fill the universe, lost its horrible immensity in his imagination as he came to realize that every man wearing that convict suit bore in his heart the wound or the scar of tragedy or of wrong inflicted or experienced. He had believed that nothing could be so terrible as to be separated from home and loved ones; but learned to wonder if it were not more terrible never to have known loved ones or home.
When his cell-mate estimated the "good time" allowance on a sentence of thirty years, Anton found that by good behavior he could reduce this sentence to seventeen years. That really meant something to live for. He thought he should be almost an old man if he lived to be thirty-three—something like poor old Peter Zowar who had been in prison twenty-five years; but no prisoner had ever lived there thirty years; and this reduction to seventeen years meant to Anton the difference between life and death. Even the seventeen years' distance from home began to be bridged when his sister Nina came to see him, bringing him the oranges and bananas indelibly associated with the streets of Chicago, or cakes made by his own mother's hands and baked in the oven at home.
Life in prison became more endurable, too, when he learned that individual skill in every department of work was recognized, and that sincerity and faithfulness counted for something even in a community of criminals. Praise was rare, communication in words was limited to the necessities of work; but in some indefinable way character was recognized and a friendly attitude made itself felt and warmed the heart; and the nature so sensitive to harshness was quick to perceive and to respond to kindness.
It is hard to be in prison when a boy, but the older convicts regard these boys with compassion, touched by something in them akin to their own lost youth, or perhaps to children of their own. Little Anton looked no older and was no larger than the average boy of fourteen; and to the older men he seemed a child.
Human nature is human nature, and youth is youth in spite of bolts and bars. The springtime of life was repressed in Anton, but it was working silently within him, and silently there was unfolding a power not given to all of us. His work in the marble-shop was readily learned, for the apprenticeship at tailoring had trained his eye and hand, and steadfast application had become habitual. As his ability was recognized ornamental work on marble was assigned him. At first he followed the patterns as did the ordinary workmen; these designs suggested to him others; then he obtained permission to work out the beautiful lines that seemed always waiting to form themselves under his hand, and the patterns were finally set aside altogether. The art impulse within him was astir and finding expression, and as time passed he was frankly recognized as the best workman in the shop.
He was homesick still, always homesick, but fresh interest had come into his existence, for unawares the spirit of beauty had come to be the companion of his working-hours. He did not recognize her. He had never heard of art impulses. But he found solid human pleasure and took simple boyish pride in the individuality and excellence of his work.
The first year and the second year of his imprisonment passed: the days dawning, darkening, and melting away, as like to one another as beads upon a string, each one counted into the past at night as meaning one day less of imprisonment. But toward the end of the second year the hours began to drag interminably, and Anton's interest in his work flagged. He became restless, the marble dust irritated his lungs, and a cough, at first unnoticed, increased until it constantly annoyed him. Then his rest at night was broken by pain in his side, and at last the doctor ordered him to be removed from the marble-shop. It was a frail body at best, and the confinement, the unremitting work, the total lack of air and exercise had done their worst; and all resisting physical power was undermined.
No longer able to work, Anton was relegated tothe "idle room." Under the wise rule of recent wardens the idle room has happily become a thing of the past, but for years it was a feature of the institution, owing partly to limited hospital accommodations. By the prisoners generally this idle room, called by them the "dreary room," was looked upon as the half-way station between the shops and the grave. Most cheerless and melancholy was this place where men too far gone in disease to work, men worn out in body and broken in spirit, waited together day after day until their maladies developed sufficiently for them to be considered fit subjects for hospital care. Usually no reading-matter was allowed, and free social intercourse was of course forbidden, although the inmates occasionally indulged in the luxury of comparing diseases. Under the strain of that deadening monotony courage failed, and to many a man indifferent to his own fate the sight of the hopelessness of others was heart-breaking. The influence of the idle room was not quite so depressing when Anton came within its circle, for a light industry had just been introduced there, and some of the inmates were employed.
And at this time Anton was beginning to live ina day-dream. His cell-mate, a young man serving a twenty years' sentence, was confidently expecting a pardon; pardons became the constant theme of talk between the two when the day was over, and Anton's faith in his own possible release kindled and glowed with the brightening prospects of his friend. Hope, that strange characteristic of tuberculosis, flamed the higher as disease progressed; with the hectic flush there came into his eyes a more brilliant light, and a stronger power to look beyond the prison to dear liberty and home. Even the shadow of the idle room could not dim the light of his imagination. No longer able to carve his fancies on stone, he wove them into beautiful patterns for life in freedom. The hope of a pardon is in the air in every prison. Anton wrote to his family and talked with his sister about it, and though he made no definite beginning every day his faith grew stronger.
It was at this time that I met Anton. I was visiting at the penitentiary, and during a conversation with a young English convict, a semi-protégé of Mary Anderson, the actress, this young man said to me: "I wish you knew my cell-mate." I replied that I already knew too many men in that prison. "But if you would only see littleAnton I knowyou would be mashed in a minute," the Englishman confidently asserted. As to that probability I was sceptical, but I was impressed by the earnestness of the young man as he sketched the outline of Anton's story and urged me to see him. I remember that he made a point of this: "The boy is so happy thinking that he will get a pardon sometime, but he will die here if somebody doesn't help him soon." To gratify the Englishman I consented to see the happy boy who was in danger of dying.
An attractive or interesting face is rare among the inmates of our prisons. The striped convict suit, which our so-called Christian civilization so long inflicted upon fellow men, in itself gave an air of degradation,[9]and the repression of all animation tends to produce an expression of almost uniform dulness. Notwithstanding his cell-mate's enthusiasm I was thrilled with surprise, and something deeper than surprise, when I saw Anton Zabrinski. The beauty of that young Polish prisoner shone like a star above the degrading convict suit. It was the face of a Raphael, with the broad brow and the large, luminous, far-apart eyes of darkest blue, suggesting in theirdepths all the beautiful repressed possibilities—eyes radiant with hope and with childlike innocence and trust. My heart was instantly vibrant with sympathy, and we were friends with the first hand-clasp. The artistic temperament was as evident in the slender, highly developed hands as in his face.
At a glance I saw that his fate was sealed; but his spirit of hope was irresistible and carried me on in its own current for the hour. Anton was like a happy child, frankly and joyfully opening his heart to a friend whom he seemed always to have known. That bright hour was unclouded by any dark forebodings in regard to illness or an obdurate governor. We talked of pardon and freedom and home and happiness. I did not speak to him of repentance or preparation for death. I felt that when the summons came to that guileless spirit it could only be a summons to a fuller life.
During our interview the son of the new warden came in, and I called his attention to Anton. It was charming to see the cordial, friendly fashion in which this young man[10]talked to the prisoner,asking where he could be found and promising to do what he could for him, while Anton felt that at last he was touching the hand of Providence. The new authorities had not been there long enough to know many of the convicts individually, but at dinner that day the warden's son interested his father in Anton by recounting their conversation that morning. The warden's always ready sympathy was touched. "Take the boy out of that idle room," he said, "take him around the yard with you to see the dogs and horses." This may not have been discipline, but it was delightfully human—and humanizing.
When I left the prison I was assured that I could depend upon the warden's influence in furthering my purpose of realizing Anton's dream, his faith and hope of pardon. The following Sunday in Chicago I found the Zabrinski family, father, mother, and the young sister, in their third-story back rooms. On the wall hung a framed photograph of Anton as a little child. The mother did not speak very clear English, but she managed to repeat, over and over again: "Anton was so good; always he was such a good boy." The young sister, a tailoress, very trim in her dark-blue Sunday gown, discussedintelligently ways and means of obtaining her brother's release.