9009/Chapter 2
For some time the three sat silent on the bench before the garden, with its fountain playing upon the red flowers. The garotter’s head, now, was bent like the murderer’s, and he was muttering to himself. He straightened suddenly, touching Collins’s elbow with his hand.
“Listen, pal,” he said hoarsely; “I’ll wise you to a thing or two.” His thick lips trembled loosely. “It’s the cons; watch them. The cons”—he looked up into Collins’s face almost appealingly, as though begging permission to rid himself of a weight. “The guards—they’re bad enough; God knows they’re all bad in this hell-hole. But the cons—they’re devils.” His grip upon Collins’s elbow tightened. “Every wan of them’s ready to give ye the worst of it some way, to job ye if he can; every wan of them is stoolin’ on the other”—he gulped oddly, seemed to swal9009 low three or four times with the motion of a bird drinking—“or lookin’ to kill ye because he thinks ye’ve stooled on him!” he finished with sudden passion.
A stripes-clad man was coming out of the turnkey’s office. “The bath-trusty” whispered the garotter, immediately resuming his cringing posture; “he’s come for us.” The bath-trusty was dressed as the man Collins had seen at the gate, but his hair, instead of being cropped close, like the other’s, was of medium length. He was scanning a slip of paper in his hand, and in his sharp face, bent to read, Collins fancied he saw the shadow of what he had seen in the face of the convict by the gate. As the man looked up at him, the impression was confirmed. The man had rat eyes.
He waved his hand to them authoritatively. “Come on,” he said, and turned his back. They followed, the garotter first, and behind John Collins, the murderer, still silent, as though dazed. They went through a hallway and up an iron flight of stairs to a room into which warm rays of sun slanted through a skylight. Here another convict received them pointing, without giving them a glance, to a bench upon which they sat while he turned to adjust the lens of a large camera. He wore green eye-shades instead of the visored cap; his black hair was quite long and foppishly parted; a little moustache covered his upper lip; his striped jacket was rounded at the bottom and had lapels; his striped trousers were carefully creased, and his buttoned shoes were of glistening patent leather. Also he wore a white collar and a four-in-hand tie. His forehead was low beneath the shiny black bangs, and there was something venomously alert about his slight body and beady eyes.
By this man and the bath-trusty few words were exchanged, and these obviously restricted to the business at hand. Between them was a barrier of caste: the photographer treated the bath-trusty with the same authority of word and manner which the latter used toward the three prisoners. And yet, through this barrier, something was constantly passing—sometimes in half-averted head, and often in sharp sidelong glance from narrowed eye—something that showed that the high standing of the one did not put him beyond peril from the other; there was not a moment when the two were not watching each other furtively. They watched each other like two hungry cats; it was as though the photographer were a cat holding a bleeding piece of meat and the other were waiting for him to slacken his guard for just a moment. One thing was plain: there was absolutely no community of interest between the two convicts; no need of guards to watch while the two were together. All of which impressed Collins vaguely, as he sat for his picture, first bare-headed, then with his hat on.
After which the three followed the bath-trusty to an inner room in which incandescent lights glowed yellow between shelves and drawers that lined the walls. At the order of another stripes-clad man, the three stripped naked in the room. Leaving their clothes there, they crossed the hall and spent ten minutes in a large concrete tank, scrubbing themselves with coarse brown soap and warm water. They returned. The bath-trusty consulted with the trusty of the clothes room. Again Collins saw the sidelong looks from narrowed eyes, the incessant watching, and then the clothes-room trusty measured the three loosely. He was a bent little man, hollow-cheeked; his eyes roved, shifting from place to place like the sun gleam from a mirror in a boy’s hand; but always they flitted back to the bath-trusty. And the bath-trusty, in turn, watched him far more closely than he watched his three charges.
They were standing stark while the clothes-room trusty rummaged about shelves and drawers and made notes in an account book. Finally, he placed before each a little pile of clothing—underwear, a striped suit, a barred cap, and a pair of coarse lace shoes. On the back of each jacket, at the collar, was a square of white cloth, and on each square the bent little convict stamped in purple ink a number. Collins, picking up his jacket, looked at the number. He was 9009.
He slid on the garments silently; and as their coarseness rasped his skin, as their ugly bars gloomed in his eyes, there came to him a feeling which the stone walls, the hardness of the garotter, the rat eyes of the trusties, the harsh implacability of walls and men, had not yet given him. As he stepped from the chair of the prison barber, his face smooth-shaven, his hair cropped close, this feeling took on a character of finality. So it was with the other two. Into each face had come a heaviness, a blank hopelessness; lines had sprung that added years to age, that took away whatever flicker had remained of gentleness and youth. The pictures now taken were as of other men than those who posed before. Even the murderer had changed.
The summer sun had sunk behind the surrounding walls as, each with a roll of bedding upon his shoulder, they stepped out again into the court, after having been pawed lightly by the photographer, measuring them by the Ber tillon system. They left the murderer at the heavily barred stone building to which the garotter had prophetically pointed; and 9009 and the garotter followed the. bath-trusty till they came to a large open space. This was flanked by two cell houses, a number of smaller buildings, and a stretch of high stone wall. The cell houses, with their long rows of black-barred windows, frowned down upon this space which, although large, seemed crushingly close, and the earth of which was beaten by feet into cement-like hardness. Along the top of the wall two blue-clad men were slowly walking, approaching a corner which was capped by a box like a tower. Each carried in his right hand a rifle, loosely, like a hunter. In the wall, near the cell house was a great steel-barred gate, and over this was an open turret from which protruded the vicious muzzle of a rapid-fire gun. Here two more blue-clad guards stood with rifles.
As 9009, the garotter, and the trusty reached the centre of the yard, the gates in the wall suddenly swung inward with a clang, and through the arched way, beneath the turret with its rapid-fire gun, a line of convicts began to flow inward, a line writhing like a snake, gray as a larva, and mounted upon legs like a centipede. It came, slowly, smoothly, across the yard, toward 9009, the garotter, and the trusty, who had halted; it crept by them; its head sank into the door of one of the cell houses to the right; and still the tail was oozing, as though it were to be endlessly, out of the archway to the left. 9009 understood; it was the lockstep of which he often had heard. The convicts marched in single file, each with both hands on the shoulders of the man before him; from this came the undulating unison of the long, striped thing. It crawled by him; he scanned its links; one by one the white faces flashed by. Each face was set straight ahead, looking downward; each face was white and held a dull hardness. And from these men, each touching the other with both hands on his shoulders, there came no sound; the lips were motionless. They marched; from head to tail the monster undulated smoothly. They marched, eyes to the ground, and grimly silent. And the stripes of all were black and gray, black and gray, black and gray—until a startling change in the ringed line’s length struck 9009 almost like a blow. It was a convict clad in stripes of black and red.
9009 heard, at his elbow, the sound of breath sucked sharply in; the garotter, leaning forward with yellow face, was watching the red-striped convict.
He came on, linked in front by his own arms, linked behind by the arms of another, a red blotch in the long gray line, till even with them. He marched with head bowed and shoulders bent. His face was dead-white with the prison pallor, heavy-jawed, and a scowl like a corrosion cleft his forehead; his eyes scanned the ground at his feet.
The garotter swallowed hard, his knees bent a bit and his shoulders rose a little; and then, suddenly, as if drawn by this shrinking movement, the eyes of the red-striped man left the ground and lit upon him. It was a flash, a glance in passing, a flicker of the lids, and the eyes went back to the beaten ground; but in that instant there had leaped from the pallid face, coarse-mouthed, a look so eloquent of hate, so dire of promise, a look a-shout with such ferocious joy, that 9009 himself went cold. The garotter was livid, and drops of sweat stood out upon his forehead.
“My God!” he said thickly.
The bath-trusty, looking straight ahead as though he were not talking, said: “He cut Donnely just after you left and got another twenty. He’s just out of solitary; first day in the jute.”
“I didn’t stool,” muttered the garotter—and his muttering, though low, had the inflection of a wail. “I didn’t stool.”
The trusty marched them on; a minute later 9009 was in his cell.