Through the Shadows with O'Henry

by Эл Дженнингс

  I tried to make out a brief for him. Porter was a valuable man in prison. He had been a pharmacist in Greensboro before entering the bank at Austin. This experience won him the envied position of drug clerk in the prison hospital. Many privileges softened the bitterness of convict life. He had a good bed, decent food and comparative freedom. Why had he failed to visit me?

  He was busy, I know. And he would have gone to almost any extremity to avoid asking a favor from the guard. It would have cut him to the quick to win a refusal from these men who were his inferiors. Was he merely waiting his easy opportunity to see me?

  I didn't understand Bill Porter then as I learned to know him later. I know now the reason for that long delay. I can appreciate the goading humiliation O.Henry suffered when he stood before my cell acknowledging himself a criminal even as myself. Porter knew my high esteem for him. Always reticent, it was an aching blow to his pride to meet me now, no longer the gentleman, but the fellow convict.

  CHAPTER XV.

  Despair; attempt at escape; in the hell-hole; torture in the prison; the diamond-thief's revenge; the flogging; hard labor; a message of hope from O. Henry.

  Weeks went by. I didn't see Porter again. The promise of help and a position in the hospital, where food was good and beds clean, had put a flavor even into prison stew. I counted on Porter. Gradually the confidence waned. I grew bitter with resentment and a cold feeling of abandonment. I had been used ragged by every one. It began to eat in on me that Bill was one with all the other ingrates I had helped.

  I did not know that he was working for me all the while. I did not realize the obstacles that block promotion in a prison. I decided to help myself. I tried to escape, was caught, sent into solitary for 14 days and then brought down from the hell-hole for trial.

  Dick Price, a convict I had befriended and a life termer, tried to save me.While I was sitting on the bench outside the deputy warden's room, Dick went past me.

  "You've got a fellow Jennings in solitary for trying to escape. I gave him the saws. He's a new man. Ain't been here long enough to know the ropes. I wised him up to escape. Give me the punishment."

  Dick spoke in a loud voice. I knew it was a cue for me. He had not given me the saws. He knew nothing about the escape until a horse-thief peached on me.

  I was called before the deputy.

  "How did you like your new home?" he asked with a leer. He meant the "hole" in solitary. "I found where you got the saws."

  "Dick Price had nothing to do with it."

  "I thought so," he said. "Dick's a 'mighty good boy. Been here a 'mighty long time. Come clean on this now and I'll make it easy for you."

  "I can't."

  "You'll have to."

  "I can't."

  "By God, I'll make you." I knew what he meant. It made me desperate with fury.

  "By God, you won't."

  "Here, take this fellow down and give him seventy-five."

  Only a man who has been in hell's mouth who has seen the blood spurt as men, stripped and chained, are beaten until their flesh is torn and broken as a derelict, knows the indignity and depravity of a prison beating. I saw myself cowed by this screaming brutality. It made a fiend of me.

  "You take me, you damn' coward; you strip me and beat me over that trough—try it, and if I live through it, I'll come back and cut your damn' throat I"

  The deputy reared from me, his face ashen with rage. Like a tortured maniac, I sprang at him. The guards rushed forward, made a leap at me, stopped abruptly, livid and simpering, as though suddenly stricken. If any one of them had touched me I could have torn him to pieces.

  I was ready to be killed outright sooner than submit to the horrors of that "punishment cell." I had seen too much of it—the prison demon dragged out of solitary and whipped into bleeding insensibility a couple of times a week—other prisoners given the "water" until their faces were one red, gushing stream and the anguished screams filled the air.

  The basement where these things were done was directly under the hospital. I passed above it and I could look down on the way to the transfer office. Three weeks before a man had been beaten to death over that trough. The awful debauchery of that murder had seared into my brain.

  The man was a friend of mine and one of the most intelligent convicts in the prison. He was a diamond robber—the cleverest crook in the pen, a man of neat speech and cultured manner. He had stolen some of the most priceless gems in the State. All the detectives in the country had not been able to locate the jewels. The jewelers offered thousands in a reward for the recovering of the diamonds. No third degree, no punishment could force from the man the location of his treasure.

  In the prison was an editor, sentenced for the murder of a rival newspaper publisher. This fellow would have crucified his own mother to gain an extra crust for himself. He was always worming his way into favor by snitching on convicts. For some strange reason perhaps because of their intellectual equality, he and the diamond robber became friends.

  One morning the newspapers carried blazing headlines. The stolen diamonds had been found. The robber's secret was out.

  Suspense and a surcharged excitement held the prison in a grip. We knew the episode was not closed. We waited.

  The diamond robber said nothing. Restless curiosity sent its questions and suppositions across the "grapevine route" from one cell block to another.

  "Who had told?" "What would happen?"

  The answer came in a sudden viciousness that revealed the whole betrayal. The robber sneaked one day down the corridor. He had a bottle in his hand. He had calculated his time. He fell into line just as the editor was going to his cell.

  There was a frenzied scream, a moment's scuffle, a loud, prolonged, tormented cry. The editor lay on the corridor floor, one eye burned out and his face puffed and flaming with the carbolic acid that was eating into his flesh. When he came out from the hospital he was half blinded and his face, such a seamy mass of ugly scars, hell itself wouldn't own him. He had won the confidence of the diamond-thief and betrayed him.

  "Seventy-five" was the punishment ordered for the robber for the assault on a fellow prisoner. He was a tall, slender fellow, graceful and muscular—made like a white marble statue.

  Prison is not the place for dark dealings. Every convict knew in less than an hour that the robber was to "get his." I walked out from the transfer office and looked down the stairs into the basement. The robber, strapped across the trough, his ankles drawn under it, his arms across the top, was already a mass of blood.

  He uttered not the slightest moan. None but a hell hound—and that's what a guard becomes when he has done a thing like this a hundred times—could have laid those heavy paddles, with their edges sharp as razor blades, across that raw and jagged flesh. The robber was beaten to the bone. Long after he was unconscious, the merciless flaying went on.

  The guards stopped. Half an hour passed. The robber came to. The guards propped him up. The deputy warden glowered over him.

  "Now say that you are sorry. Say that you'll obey the rules," he thundered.

  The mangled, bleeding victim, who couldn't stand, couldn't speak, raised a gray, death-stricken face. And after a long pause, a husky curse came from his lips.

  " ----------him, I wish I got his other eye."

  They strapped him back to the trough and hacked him to death. Broken bones, ragged flesh, they struck into it until it doubled a limp mass into the trough.

  That's what "seventy-five" meant in the Ohio penitentiary in 1899.

  They called me a man-killer. I never murdered a man in my life. I shot quick and clean in self-defense. I would have felt myself a degraded beast to have foully killed like that.

  If that warden had carried out his sentence, he would have died like a cur. He knew it.

  I was reduced to the fourth grade, given a suit of white with black stripes running horizontally across it, put in with the lockstep gang and sent to the bolt contract to work.

  The confinement
, the isolation, the cruel discipline took the spirit out of me. I heard from no one. No one was allowed to see me. Papers, books, visitors were denied me.

  And then I faked sick just to get a word to Porter.

  The "croaker" was taking my temperature. Bill came out of the prescription-room; he was not allowed to speak to me. His look was enough. Bitter, sad, troubled. He nodded to me and turned his back. I knew that Bill had tried and failed. He was powerless to help me.

  I went back to the bolt works. This is the hardest labor in the prison. Outside contractors pay the State about 30 cents a day for the hire of the men. If a given task is not finished on time the convict is sent to the hole for punishment. Twice in three days "Little Jim," a negro, was given the "water."

  A hose with a nozzle, one-quarter of an inch in diameter, sixty pounds pressure behind it, sends a stream of terrific force at the prisoner. His head is held strapped, the stream that is hard as steel is turned full in the man's face, his eyes, his nostrils. The pressure compels him to open his mouth. The swift, battering deluge tears down his throat and rips his stomach in two. No man can stand the "water" twice and live.

  Little Jim passed my bench one morning.

  "Mr. Al, they done give Lil Jim the water ag'in," he whispered, walked a step, flopped to the ground, a red geyser spouting from his mouth. Before Little Jim reached the hospital he was dead.

  After that morning, I was about finished. I lost all hope, all ambition. Bill Porter saved me.

  Across the grapevine route he sent his message. From one convict to another the word went until it was stealthily whispered in my ear:

  "Don't lose heart. I'm working. There's a new main finger."

  CHAPTER XVI.

  The new main finger; a tuba solo; failure at prayer; transfer to the post-office; literary ambition; O. Henry writes a story.

  The new "main finger" meant a new warden and an entire change of administration. A shift like this sent the prison into feverish, suppressed excitement.

  I was working at the bolt contract. A patrol guard glided to my bench in the shop and silently beckoned to me. There is something mischievously sinister in the hushed voices and the noiseless tread of men in prison. Without a word, without even knowing where I was going, I followed.

  I was taken out of the fourth grade when I arrived at the State shop.

  "Think you could play a tuba solo Sunday?" the guard asked. "You're going back to your place in the band."

  Musicians are scarce enough in prison. I had been one of the dominant notes in the band before I was thrown into solitary.

  Sunday the new warden was to publicly take office. Several hundred visitors would be present. The warden would make his speech to the 1,700 convicts. The prison band would furnish entertainment.

  As I passed through the chaplain's office into the library, where the band, met before going to the rostrum, Bill Porter stood at the door. Quite dignified as always, but his face set, almost despondent, Porter greeted me.

  "Colonel, you are looking better. Thank God they needed the tuba solo." He lowered the tone that was always hesitant and whispering. "I think, pardner, you are in a religious fervor. There is a vacancy in the chaplain's office. Do you think you could pray?"

  I don't know whether I was happier at the prospect of leaving the bolt shop or in the assurance that Porter had won me back in the band and was as loyal to me as I would have been to him.

  "Pray I Hell, yes, Bill. Sure I can pray if it will get me off the contract."

  How many prayers we offered just to get us "off the contract." Porter smiled.

  "Never think that I forget you, colonel. Believe me, that my thoughts were with you every time a poor, outraged devil sent his screams up from the basement."

  I looked at Porter, surprised at the tense emotion in his voice. His lips quivered and a sort of gray blight seemed spreading over his face.

  "I can't drag out much longer," he said.

  It was one of the few times that Porter ever voiced his loathing of the prison system of punishments, and yet he knew perhaps more of its ghastly outrages than any other convict.

  Porter had already been night clerk at the hospital for a year and a half. He saw the broken bodies brought up from the basement when men were all but done to death in vicious floggings, in the water and in the hangings. He saw the doctors work over these tortured wrecks, and heal them just so that they could be further tormented.

  And when some bitter wretch, driven desperate and insane, would attempt suicide in his cell, Porter was always forced to accompany the prison doctor and aid him to revive the convict. These attempted suicides were almost a nightly occurrence. Often they succeeded.

  Comparatively easy as a place in the hospital was, no toil could have corroded into the heart of a man of Porter's temperament as did this unabating contact with misery.

  He used to come into the post-office and sit for hours, dumb with a bleak, aching despair. In the blithest moments of his success in New York, Porter could never shake himself free from the clawing shadow of the prison walls.

  Porter got me into the chaplain's office, but I didn't make good. I couldn't see my way clear to join the Sunday school. The chaplain took a violent grudge against me the day after my arrival. It was noon on a Wednesday when theminister and two convicts passed through the outer office into the chaplain's private study. One of the converts was a regular spittoon bully, in -for horse-stealing; the other was a cheap vaudeville actor. He had cut his wife's throat. They were not in my class.

  "We're going to pray," the chaplain informed me.

  "That's all right with me," I answered.

  He scowled at me, his face white with irritation, his puny voice shrilling out, "Aren't you going in to pray?"

  "No. Not with that crowd."

  The nigger horse-thief, the cut-throat and the minister went into the study and the chaplain stood while the convicts threw themselves on their knees and immediately began mumbling and moaning to the Creator.

  An hour later I was sent to the deputy warden for insolence and insubordination. He dismissed the charge.

  "You don't have to pray if you don't want to. That ain't what you're sent to the pen for."

  I was given a job in the post-office. Billy Raidler, another train-robber, was chief post-office clerk. In this new position I had considerable liberty, I was near to the hospital. Bill Porter, Raidler and I cemented a friendship that lasted until the death, first of Porter, then of Raidler.

  Raidler was the most beloved man in the pen. He had been the terror of the Indian Territory in his outlaw days. Yet he was slender, fair-haired, soft- voiced as a girl. He had an impish wit and the most obliging nature of any man I ever met. In his last fight with the marshals he had lost three fingers of his right hand. Two bullets caught him in the neck, knocking his spine askew. He walked as though he had locomotor ataxia.

  Bill Porter was just as much the recluse in prison as he had been in Honduras and Mexico. He did not make friends readily. Between him and the world was an impassable barrier. No man was privileged to break down that wall which hid his hopes, his thoughts, his troubles. And so he liked the outlaw prisoners better than other men. They had learned the fine art of indifference to the other fellow's affairs.

  In the post-office, Billy Raidler, Porter and I passed many a happy hour. I came to see a new Porter, who afterward developed into O. Henry, the smile-maker.

  The discovery came about in a peculiar manner.

  I had started to write the memoirs of my bandit days. Every man in prison is writing a story. Each man considers his life a tragedy an adventure of the most absorbing interest. I had given my book a fine title. Raidler was enthusiastic about it. He gloried in "my flow of language."

  "The Long Riders" was galloping ahead at a furious stride. There were chapters in it with 40,000 words and not one climax. There were other chapters with but seven sentences and as many killings as there were words.

  Raidler insisted that a man b
e shot in every paragraph. It would make the book "go," he said. Finally I came to a halt.

  "If I have any more men killed," I said, "there'll be nobody left on earth."

  "I'll tell you what you do," Raidler said. "You ask Bill Porter about it. He's writing a story, too."

  At that moment I felt myself far the greater writer of the two. I had not even known that Porter hoped to write. He dropped in to see us in the afternoon.

  "Bill tells me you're writing a story," I said. Porter looked at me auickly, a dark flush staining his cheek.

  "No, I'm not writing, I'm just practicing," he said.

  "Oh, is that all?" I felt really sorry for the man who was destined to write the finest stories America ever read.

  "Well, I'm writing one. In fact, it's almost finished. Come in and I'll read it to you."

  Porter left the room quickly. I never saw him for two weeks.

  A desk and a chair inside the railing of the prison drug store—the five wards of the hospital grouped around that store and in those wards from 50 to 200 patients racked with all manner of disease. The quiet of the night disturbed with the groans of broken men, the coughs of the wasted, the frightened gasp of the dying. The night nurse padding from ward to ward and every once in a while returning to the drug store with the crude information another "con" has croaked. Then, down the corridors the rattle of the wheelbarrow and the negro life termer bumping the "stiff" to the dead house. A desk and a chair settled in the raw heart of chill depression!

  There at that desk, night after night, sat Bill Porter. And in the grisly atmosphere of prison death and prison brutality there bubbled up the mellow smile of his genius—the smile born of heartache, of shame, of humiliation—the smile that has sent its ripple of faith and understanding to the hearts of men and women everywhere.

  When it first caught Billy Raidler and me, we cried outright. I think it was about the proudest moment in O. Henry's life. He had come into the prison post-office on a Friday afternoon. It was just about a fortnight after I had offered to read him my memoirs.