It Is Never Too Late to Mend Part 25

The next day, as Robinson was working in the corridor, the governor came in with a gentleman whom he treated with unusual and marked respect.

This gentleman was the chairman of the quarter-sessions, and one of those magistrates who had favored the adoption of the present system.

Mr. Williams inspected the prison; was justly pleased with its exquisite cleanness; he questioned the governor as to the health of the prisoners, and received for answer that most of them were well, but that there were some exceptions; this appeared to satisfy him. He went into the labor-yard, looked at the cranks, examined the numbers printed on each in order to learn their respective weights, and see that the prisoners were not overburdened.

Went with the governor into three or four cells, and asked the prisoners if they had any complaint to make.

The unanimous answer was "No!"

He then complimented the governor--and drove home to his own house, Ashtown Park.

There, after dinner, he said to a brother magistrate, "I inspected the jail to-day; was all over it."

The next morning Fry, the morose, came into Robinson's cell with a more cheerful countenance than usual. Robinson noticed it.

"You are put on the crank," said Fry.

"Oh! am I?"

"Of course you are. Your sentence was hard labor, wasn't it? I don't know why you weren't sent on a fortnight ago."

Fry then took him out into the labor-yard, which he found perforated with cells about half the size of his hermitage in the corridor. In each of these little quiet grottoes lurked a monster, called a crank. A crank is a machine of this sort--there springs out of a vertical post an iron handle, which the workman, taking it by both hands, works round and round, as in some country places you may have seen the villagers draw a bucket up from a well. The iron handle goes at the shoulder into a small iron box at the top of the post; and inside that box the resistance to the turner is regulated by the manufacturer, who states the value of the resistance outside in cast-iron letters. Thus:

5-lb. crank. 7-lb. crank. 10, 12, etc., etc.

"Eighteen hundred revolutions per hour," said Mr. Fry, in his voice of routine, and "you are to work two hours before dinner."

So saying he left him, and Robinson, with the fear of punishment before him, lost not a moment in getting to work. He found the crank go easy enough at first, but the longer he was at it the stiffer it seemed to turn. And after about four hundred turns he was fain to breathe and rest himself. He took three minutes' rest, then at it again. All this time there was no taskmaster, as in Egypt, nor whipper-up of declining sable energy, as in Old Kentucky. So that if I am so fortunate as to have a reader aged ten, he is wondering why the fool did not confine his exertions to saying he had made the turns. My dear, it would not do.

Though no mortal oversaw the thief at his task, the eye of science was in that cell and watched every stroke and her inexorable finger marked it down. In plain English, on the face of the machine was a thing like a chronometer with numbers set all round and a hand which, somehow or other, always pointed to the exact number of turns the thief had made.

The crank was an autometer, or self-measurer, and in that respect your superior and mine, my little drake.

This was Robinson's first acquaintance with the crank. The tread-wheel had been the mode in his time; so by the time he had made three thousand turns he was rather exhausted. He leaned upon the iron handle and sadly regretted his garden and his brushes; but fear and dire necessity were upon him; he set to his task and to work again. "I won't look at the meter again, for it always tells me less than I expect. I'll just plow on till that beggar comes. I know he will come to the minute."

Sadly and doggedly he turned the iron handle, and turned and turned again; and then he panted and rested a minute, and then doggedly to his idle toil again. He was now so fatigued that his head seemed to have come loose, he could not hold it up, and it went round and round and round with the crank-handle. Hence it was that Mr. Fry stood at the mouth of the den without the other seeing him.

"Halt," said Fry. Robinson looked up, and there was the turnkey inspecting him with a discontented air. "I'm done," thought Robinson, "here he is as black as thunder--the number not right, no doubt."

"What are ye at," growled Fry. "You are forty over," and the said Fry looked not only ill-used but a little unhappy. Robinson's good behavior had disappointed the poor soul.

This Fry was a grim oddity; he experienced a feeble complacency when things went wrong--but never else.

The thief exulted, and was taken back to his cell. Dinner came almost immediately. Four ounces of meat instead of three; two ounces less bread, but a large access of potatoes, which more than balanced the account.

The next day Robinson was put on the crank again, but not till the afternoon. He had finished about half his task, when he heard at some little distance from him a faint moaning. His first impulse was to run out of his cell and see what was the matter, but Hodges and Fry were both in the yard, and he knew that they would report him for punishment upon the least breach of discipline. So he turned and turned the crank, with these moans ringing in his ears and perplexing his soul.

Finding they did not cease, he peeped cautiously into the yard, and there he saw the governor himself as well as Hodges and Fry. All three were standing close to the place whence these groans issued, and with an air of complete unconcern.

But presently the groans ceased, and then mysteriously enough the little group of disciplinarians threw off their apathy. Hodges and Fry went hastily to the pump with buckets, which they filled, and then came back to the governor; the next minute Robinson heard water dashed repeatedly against the walls of the cell, and then the governor laughed, and Hodges laughed, and even the gloomy Fry vented a brief grim chuckle.

And now Robinson quivered with curiosity as he turned his crank, but there was no means of gratifying it. It so happened, however, that some ten minutes later the governor sent Hodges and Fry to another part of the prison, and they had not been gone long before a message came to himself, on which he went hastily out, and the yard was left empty.

Robinson's curiosity had reached such a pitch that notwithstanding the risk he ran--for he knew the governor would send back to the yard the very first disengaged officer he met--he could not stay quiet. As the governor closed the gate he ran with all speed to the cell, he darted in, and then the thief saw what made the three honest men laugh so. He saw it, and started back with a cry of dismay, for the sight chilled the felon to the bone.

A lad about fifteen years of age was pinned against the wall in agony by a leathern belt pa.s.sed round his shoulders and drawn violently round two staples in the wall. His arms were jammed against his sides by a straight waistcoat fastened with straps behind, and those straps drawn with the utmost severity. But this was not all. A high leathern collar a quarter of an inch thick squeezed his throat in its iron grasp. His hair and his clothes were drenched with water which had been thrown in bucketsful over him, and now dripped from him on the floor. His face was white, his lips livid, his eyes were nearly glazed, and his teeth chattered with cold and pain.

A more unprincipled man than Robinson did not exist; but burglary and larceny do not extinguish humanity in a thinking rascal as resigning the soul to system can extinguish it in a dull dog.

"Oh, what is this!" cried Robinson, "what are the villains doing to you?"

He received no answer; but the boy's eyes opened wide, and he turned those glazing eyes, the only part of his body he could turn, toward the speaker. Robinson ran up to him, and began to try and loosen him.

At this the boy cried out, almost screaming with terror, "Let me alone!

let me alone! They'll give it me worse if you do, and they'll serve you out, too!"

"But you will die, boy. Look at his poor lips!"

"No, no, no! I shan't die! No such luck!" cried the boy impatiently and wildly. "Thank you for speaking kind to me. Who are you? tell me quick, and go. I am ---- Josephs, No. 15, Corridor A."

"I am Robinson, No. 19, Corridor B."

"Good-bye, Robinson, I shan't forget you. Hark, the door! Go! go! go!

go! go!"

Robinson was already gone. He had fled at the first click of a key in the outward door, and darted into his cell at the moment Fry got into the yard. An instinct of suspicion led this man straight to Robinson's hermitage. He found him hard at work. Fry scrutinized his countenance, but Robinson was too good an actor to betray himself; only when Fry pa.s.sed on he drew a long breath. What he had seen surprised as well as alarmed him, for he had always been told the new system discouraged personal violence of all sorts; and in all his experience of the old jails he had never seen a prisoner abused so savagely as the young martyr in the adjoining cell. His own work done, he left for his own dormitory. He was uneasy, and his heart was heavy for poor Josephs; but he dared not even cast a look toward his place of torture, for the other executioners had returned, and Fry followed grim at his heels like a mastiff d.o.g.g.i.ng a stranger out of the premises.

That evening Robinson spent in gloomy reflections and forebodings. "I wish I was in the hulks or anywhere out of this place," said he. As for Josephs, the governor, after inspecting his torture for a few minutes, left the yard again with his subordinates, and Josephs was left alone with his great torture for two hours more; then Hodges came in and began to loose him, swearing at him all the time for a little rebellious monkey that gave more trouble than enough. The rebellious monkey made no answer, but crawled slowly away to his dungeon, s.h.i.+vering in his drenched clothes, stiff and sore, his bones full of pain, his heart full of despondency.

Robinson had now eight thousand turns of the crank per day, and very hard work he found it; but he preferred it to being buried alive all day in his cell; and warned by Josephs' fate, he went at the crank with all his soul, and never gave them an excuse for calling him "refractory." It happened, however, one day, just after breakfast, that he was taken with a headache and s.h.i.+vering; and not getting better after chapel, but rather worse, he rang his bell and begged to see the surgeon. The surgeon ought to have been in the jail at this hour. He was not, though, and as he had been the day before, and was accustomed to neglect the prisoners for any one who paid better, he was not expected this day.

Soon after Fry came to the cell and ordered Robinson out to the crank.

Robinson told him he was too ill to work.

"I must have the surgeon's authority for that, before I listen to it,"

replied Fry, amateur of routine.

"But he is not in the jail, or you would have it."

"Then he ought to be."

"Well, is it my fault he's s.h.i.+rking his duty? Send for him, and you'll see he will tell you I am not fit for the crank to-day; my head is splitting."

"Come, no gammon, No. 19; it is the crank or the jacket, or else the black hole. So take which you like best."

Robinson rose with a groan of pain and despondency.

"It is only eight thousand words you have got to say to it, and they are not many for such a tongue as yours."

At the end of the time Fry came to the mouth of the labor-cell with a grim chuckle. "He will never have done his number this time." He found Robinson kneeling on the ground, almost insensible, the crank-handle convulsively grasped in his hands. Fry's first glance was at this figure, that a painter might have taken for a picture of labor overtasked; but this was neither new nor interesting to Fry. He went eagerly to examine the meter of the crank--there lay his heart, such as it was--and to his sorrow he found that No. 19 had done his work before he broke down. What it cost the poor fever-stricken wretch to do it can easier be imagined than described.

They a.s.sisted Robinson to his cell, and that night he was in a burning fever. The next day the surgeon happened by some accident to be at his post, and prescribed change of diet and medicines for him. "He would be better in the infirmary."