CHAPTER VIII

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 of[Pg 140] having 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.[Pg 141] 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.

[Pg 142]

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 man[Pg 143] that 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 fast[Pg 144] drifting 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 of[Pg 145] those 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 to[Pg 146] give 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.[Pg 147] 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's[Pg 148] nature 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, which[Pg 149] I 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 and [Pg 150]believe 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 it must come 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 expectations[Pg 151] that "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 clemency[Pg 152] except 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 fact[Pg 153] of 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 release[Pg 154] we 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, and I cannot find words to thank you." And dropping his head on his folded arms the man burst into tears, his whole body shaken[Pg 155] with 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. How hard he 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,[Pg 156] 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.