9009/Chapter 12
About the rasp-file 9009’s life now enwrapped itself. The thing was the symbol of his purpose, his engrossing purpose, the one fixed light left in his blackened soul. For many days he carried it with him just as it was, beneath his garments; at night he stretched deliciously to its rasp, there against his skin, upon his heart. A somnolent apathy had come over him; that mere contact gave him a profound satisfaction, almost a satiety: it was with an effort that he roused himself to the next step. But at length he stole from the machine-shop another file, a small one, of diamond steel, and with it he began to sharpen the big one, of softer steel, into a knife.
He worked at night, surreptitiously, with infinite precaution, under the muffle of his blanket, his ears taut to the hissing feet of the guard; and progress was slow, but exquisite from its very slowness. He was greatly delayed by the necessity of parting for long periods with the object of his tenderness.
He had found, in the stone wall of the laundry, which stood a bare two feet from the stone wall of the cook-house, a niche hollowed for a water-pipe; and whenever he feared discovery, or his instinct announced to him the coming of a search, he dropped his file in the niche behind the water-pipe. Then for days he would be separated from it, tortured with sudden accesses of fear in spite of his confidence in the security of his hiding-place. But he had become wonderfully patient, and he stood the test well. His purpose burned within him always, without a sputter, fixed, unalterable. He remembered how the murderer of the garotter had waited, days, weeks, months, never letting the desire of his heart light up his eyes, while the garotter passed and repassed him, and on his breast the knife lay, not quite ready. A patience such as this was now with him always, a patience he felt inexhaustible within him, and in which he took a grim and sullen pride.
And so, night after night, with intervals of long separations, he fondled the file, and beneath his caressing and firm sculpturing gradually it grew into the shape he loved—pointed, razor-edged, well-poised. The feel of its well-balanced weight in his hand was a constant joy. It could split a skull or carve out a rib. It was just like the knife he had watched on the desk of the captain of the yard, the day of the jute-mill murder, a trifle bigger, stronger, better shaped if anything. It cut him often as it lay against his skin, upon his heart—and he accepted these wounds voluptuously, as a mother accepts the scratches of the babe she loves; at night he stretched ecstatically to the rasping of it, as a religious fanatic stretches to the torture of his hair shirt. Visions came to him then. He saw the red-striped convict of the jute-mill spring, leap-frog fashion, upon the garotter; he saw his right hand sink into the bent back with a crunch, then rise, fall, rise, fall.” And by a swift transformation, it was he that sprang, leap-frog fashion; his hand that pumped, up and down, up and down; his knees that grasped a thick gurgling neck—and the neck was not that of the garotter.
He waited, grimly patient, day after day, week after week. At times, without much conviction, he tried to coax on the favourable moment; and this resulted in what the prison officials took for attempts at escaping—attempts incredibly stupid.
On one Sunday, for instance, he wandered into the office of the captain of the yard under the excuse of drawing a new suit of underwear. He could hear the voice of Jennings in the inner office, and he was very long in picking his garment, rejecting suit after suit under flimsy pretexts; then after finally he had had to choose, loitered in the outer corridor, aimlessly, till Wilson, with the unerring instinct of the informer, becoming suspicious, ordered him out. He cursed Wilson; and for this he was given a week in the dungeon.
On another day, he broke up the lock-step line in its morning march from cell-house to dining-hall. Jennings commanded the line that day. He stood near the wall, fifty feet from the line as it passed. With a furtive movement, 9009 threw from him a piece of plug tobacco which he had traded from another convict for a pair of hoarded shoe-laces. It lit on the ground, twenty feet from Jennings, unseen of all. Then, very calmly, 9009 stepped out of the line and walked toward Jennings. Immediately voices rose; from the wall a rifle cracked; a bullet struck the ground at 9009’s feet. Disdainfully he stooped, picked up the tobacco, placed it between his teeth, and shuffled back to the line. He had been unable to get nearer than the twenty feet from Jennings.
For this he was given the water-cure. Fettered to a ring stapled in the stone wall of the corridor leading to the dungeon, he stood before the captain of the yard, who played upon his face the powerful stream of a hose till he was half-drowned and chilled to the marrow.
Some time after he made another attempt, a more serious one, but just as stupid from the point of view of the prison officers. Slipping out of the line as it left the foundry (it was the dusk of a winter’s day) he crawled to the cook-house and slipped into the narrow space between that and the laundry, near the niche where he used to hide his knife at times of danger from search. By the mouth of this narrow gut, Jennings had to pass four times a day on his way to the jute-mill and back.
But Jennings did not appear. He was out at the head of a posse which, deceived, pursued an unwitting tramp over the hills. For three days 9009 crouched foodless and shelterless in his retreat while man-hunters roamed the hills for him on the outside; then Wilson, heading a search within the walls, found him. For his pains he was throttled almost to death before the guards could part 9009’s iron fingers.
For this 9009 was formally tried in the court of the district under the charge of assault to commit murder. The trial was short. 9009 did not open his mouth once. And he moved not a muscle when the judge sentenced him to ten additional years in the penitentiary.
He was placed, now, in solitary confinement.
The solitary cells were on the top floor of the building to which the garotter had pointed, for the information of the murderer, on 9009’s first day. This building was known about the prison as the “Stone Building,” probably from the massiveness of its walls. The solitary cells were in a corridor by themselves. The light was dim there; it came from a single small window high up in the wall.
They watched him, in his cage up there, in the shadowy corridor; a guard stood all day before his steel-barred door. By night he was left alone. The cell was steel-walled, steel-floored, steel-barred in front. It was six feet long and five wide. The bunk took two and a half feet of the width; so there was left a space six feet long and two and a half feet wide in which 9009 could walk. Once each two weeks his guard took him into the corridor and let him exercise there. His eyes dilated with the dim light. His hair had grown long, for they seldom sent the prison barber to him, and the lines on his face had deepened to crevasses.
He slept, fitfully, as an animal sleeps in a cage, by short snatches; he walked to and fro in the confined space; he mended his clothes. And he planned.
To merely wait for his chance, now, was not sufficient. To fulfil his purpose, he must get out of the solitary cell. His knife lay in the niche behind the water-pipe; he had dropped it there when discovered by Wilson. For the fulfilment of his purpose, he must have the knife; and to have the knife he must get out of his cell. The rest would be comparatively easy, for the building was not locked. It would take care and stealth, a careful avoidance of guard and trusty.
He felt no hurry. The years of his new sentence lay ahead of him; he took pleasure in a contemplation of them, stretching long before him; it was as if eternity, suddenly, had been placed at the service of his purpose. Once only did he sicken with impatience and worry; this was when lipless prison rumour told him that Jennings lay ill in the hospital. Two weeks later, though, he heard that the guard was back at his duty in the jute-mill, and his bars roared out his relief in a rattle that reverberated long in the dusky corridor. But this had been a lesson; he saw the danger of procrastination, and concentrated his mind on the problem of leaving his cell. And finally the solution came.
He began to ask for needles often—as often as he dared, making the while a great show of repairing his garments. In this way, in a year he collected ten needles.
He took these ten needles and fitted them into the wooden stem of a brier pipe. He fitted them close together, like the teeth of a comb; they were hard; they made a diminutive saw; and they bit steel. With these needles he began to saw his bars.
He sawed for a year, and had three bars nearly through; and then his cell was changed.
His patience, now, had become something fundamental within him, as granite is fundamental of the earth. He sat down and waited. They changed him again to another cell. And then to another. He spent nearly three years in different cells, and then, one morning, he found himself again in the cell where he had sawed. That night he tested the bars. They were as he had left them, three years before. Three of them were severed but for a thread of steel; the guards had discovered nothing. He began purring at the fourth bar.
He worked craftily, with stealth, at night, very slowly; for before him lay years, the eternity of time placed, by a trick of Fate, at the disposal of his purpose; and it was silly to take chances. He worked in the shadows, crouched, rubbing evenly, quietly, but firmly, cutting bars of steel with needles. When he had done each night, he scattered with deep breaths of his lungs the almost imperceptible little heap of steel dust resulting, and smudged over the thin wound in the bar with a bit of moistened bread and lamp-black. So he lived, eating but little, sleeping fitfully, like a caged animal, lying on his back staring up into the shadows with eyes dilated with long penetration of gloom, lived with his purpose. But at times an agony of cold sweat poured out upon his skin as he thought that perhaps his knife, his precious file-knife, needle-pointed, razor-edged, so well balanced, toward which he was cutting his way through bars of steel with needles, that his knife might not be there, in the niche behind the water-pipe, where he had left it.
And then, suddenly, one day an astounding thing happened; he received a letter.
Two convicts, two new trusties whom 9009 had never seen, were cleaning the corridor. The arm of one snapped abruptly, and between the bars something that looked like a white butterfly fluttered in and lit upon the steel floor near 9009. He placed his foot upon it, and several minutes later picked it up.
It was a letter, and it was from Nell. It was from Nell! From Nell, the woman he had kept from his thoughts, the woman from whom, stubbornly, knowing life and her kind, he had refused to expect anything; and it was an extraordinary letter.
For three years she had been working from the outside to help him. And now she had accomplished her purpose.
In the passageway between the bakery and the laundry, the letter said, in an old drain-pipe, a rifle, a revolver, and a rope lay cached for him.
That night 9009 sawed with his needles through the last fibres of the four bars.