CHAPTER XX.

The time came when I humbled Warden Atherton to unconditional

surrender, making a vain and empty mouthing of his ultimatum, “Dynamite

or curtains.” He gave me up as one who could not be killed in a

strait-jacket. He had had men die after several hours in the jacket. He

had had men die after several days in the jacket, although, invariably,

they were unlaced and carted into hospital ere they breathed their last

. . . and received a death certificate from the doctor of pneumonia, or

Bright’s disease, or valvular disease of the heart.

But me Warden Atherton could never kill. Never did the urgency arise of

carting my maltreated and perishing carcass to the hospital. Yet I will

say that Warden Atherton tried his best and dared his worst. There was

the time when he double-jacketed me. It is so rich an incident that I

must tell it.

It happened that one of the San Francisco newspapers (seeking, as every

newspaper and as every commercial enterprise seeks, a market that will

enable it to realize a profit) tried to interest the radical portion of

the working class in prison reform. As a result, union labour

possessing an important political significance at the time, the

time-serving politicians at Sacramento appointed a senatorial committee

of investigation of the state prisons.

This State Senate committee _investigated_ (pardon my italicized sneer)

San Quentin. Never was there so model an institution of detention. The

convicts themselves so testified. Nor can one blame them. They had

experienced similar investigations in the past. They knew on which side

their bread was buttered. They knew that all their sides and most of

their ribs would ache very quickly after the taking of their testimony

. . . if said testimony were adverse to the prison administration. Oh,

believe me, my reader, it is a very ancient story. It was ancient in

old Babylon, many a thousand years ago, as I well remember of that old

time when I rotted in prison while palace intrigues shook the court.

As I have said, every convict testified to the humaneness of Warden

Atherton’s administration. In fact, so touching were their testimonials

to the kindness of the Warden, to the good and varied quality of the

food and the cooking, to the gentleness of the guards, and to the

general decency and ease and comfort of the prison domicile, that the

opposition newspapers of San Francisco raised an indignant cry for more

rigour in the management of our prisons, in that, otherwise, honest but

lazy citizens would be seduced into seeking enrolment as prison guests.

The Senate Committee even invaded solitary, where the three of us had

little to lose and nothing to gain. Jake Oppenheimer spat in its faces

and told its members, all and sundry, to go to hell. Ed Morrell told

them what a noisome stews the place was, insulted the Warden to his

face, and was recommended by the committee to be given a taste of the

antiquated and obsolete punishments that, after all, must have been

devised by previous Wardens out of necessity for the right handling of

hard characters like him.

I was careful not to insult the Warden. I testified craftily, and as a

scientist, beginning with small beginnings, making an art of my

exposition, step by step, by tiny steps, inveigling my senatorial

auditors on into willingness and eagerness to listen to the next

exposure, the whole fabric so woven that there was no natural halting

place at which to drop a period or interpolate a query . . . in this

fashion, thus, I got my tale across.

Alas! no whisper of what I divulged ever went outside the prison walls.

The Senate Committee gave a beautiful whitewash to Warden Atherton and

San Quentin. The crusading San Francisco newspaper assured its

working-class readers that San Quentin was whiter than snow, and

further, that while it was true that the strait-jacket was still a

recognized legal method of punishment for the refractory, that,

nevertheless, at the present time, under the present humane and

spiritually right-minded Warden, the strait-jacket was never, under any

circumstance, used.

And while the poor asses of labourers read and believed, while the

Senate Committee dined and wined with the Warden at the expense of the

state and the tax payer, Ed Morrell, Jake Oppenheimer, and I were lying

in our jackets, laced just a trifle more tightly and more vindictively

than we had ever been laced before.

“It is to laugh,” Ed Morrell tapped to me, with the edge of the sole of

his shoe.

“I should worry,” tapped Jake.

And as for me, I too capped my bitter scorn and laughter, remembered

the prison houses of old Babylon, smiled to myself a huge cosmic smile,

and drifted off and away into the largeness of the little death that

made me heir of all the ages and the rider full-panoplied and astride

of time.

Yea, dear brother of the outside world, while the whitewash was running

off the press, while the august senators were wining and dining, we

three of the living dead, buried alive in solidarity, were sweating our

pain in the canvas torture.

And after the dinner, warm with wine, Warden Atherton himself came to

see how fared it with us. Me, as usual, they found in coma. Doctor

Jackson for the first time must have been alarmed. I was brought back

across the dark to consciousness with the bite of ammonia in my

nostrils. I smiled into the faces bent over me.

“Shamming,” snorted the Warden, and I knew by the flush on his face and

the thickness in his tongue that he had been drinking.

I licked my lips as a sign for water, for I desired to speak.

“You are an ass,” I at last managed to say with cold distinctness. “You

are an ass, a coward, a cur, a pitiful thing so low that spittle would

be wasted on your face. In such matter Jake Oppenheimer is

over-generous with you. As for me, without shame I tell you the only

reason I do not spit upon you is that I cannot demean myself nor so

degrade my spittle.”

“I’ve reached the limit of my patience!” he bellowed. “I will kill you,

Standing!”

“You’ve been drinking,” I retorted. “And I would advise you, if you

must say such things, not to take so many of your prison curs into your

confidence. They will snitch on you some day, and you will lose your

job.”

But the wine was up and master of him.

“Put another jacket on him,” he commanded. “You are a dead man,

Standing. But you’ll not die in the jacket. We’ll bury you from the

hospital.”

This time, over the previous jacket, the second jacket was put on from

behind and laced up in front.

“Lord, Lord, Warden, it is bitter weather,” I sneered. “The frost is

sharp. Wherefore I am indeed grateful for your giving me two jackets. I

shall be almost comfortable.”

“Tighter!” he urged to Al Hutchins, who was drawing the lacing. “Throw

your feet into the skunk. Break his ribs.”

I must admit that Hutchins did his best.

“You _will_ lie about me,” the Warden raved, the flush of wine and

wrath flooding ruddier into his face. “Now see what you get for it.

Your number is taken at last, Standing. This is your finish. Do you

hear? This is your finish.”

“A favour, Warden,” I whispered faintly. Faint I was. Perforce I was

nearly unconscious from the fearful constriction. “Make it a triple

jacketing,” I managed to continue, while the cell walls swayed and

reeled about me and while I fought with all my will to hold to my

consciousness that was being squeezed out of me by the jackets.

“Another jacket . . . Warden . . . It . . . will . . . be . . . so . .

. much . . . er . . . warmer.”

And my whisper faded away as I ebbed down into the little death.

I was never the same man after that double-jacketing. Never again, to

this day, no matter what my food, was I properly nurtured. I suffered

internal injuries to an extent I never cared to investigate. The old

pain in my ribs and stomach is with me now as I write these lines. But

the poor, maltreated machinery has served its purpose. It has enabled

me to live thus far, and it will enable me to live the little longer to

the day they take me out in the shirt without a collar and stretch my

neck with the well-stretched rope.

But the double-jacketing was the last straw. It broke down Warden

Atherton. He surrendered to the demonstration that I was unkillable. As

I told him once:

“The only way you can get me, Warden, is to sneak in here some night

with a hatchet.”

Jake Oppenheimer was responsible for a good one on the Warden which I

must relate:

“I say, Warden, it must be straight hell for you to have to wake up

every morning with yourself on your pillow.”

And Ed Morrell to the Warden:

“Your mother must have been damn fond of children to have raised you.”

It was really an offence to me when the jacketing ceased. I sadly

missed that dream world of mine. But not for long. I found that I could

suspend animation by the exercise of my will, aided mechanically by

constricting my chest and abdomen with the blanket. Thus I induced

physiological and psychological states similar to those caused by the

jacket. So, at will, and without the old torment, I was free to roam

through time.

Ed Morrell believed all my adventures, but Jake Oppenheimer remained

sceptical to the last. It was during my third year in solitary that I

paid Oppenheimer a visit. I was never able to do it but that once, and

that one time was wholly unplanned and unexpected.

It was merely after unconsciousness had come to me that I found myself

in his cell. My body, I knew, lay in the jacket back in my own cell.

Although never before had I seen him, I knew that this man was Jake

Oppenheimer. It was summer weather, and he lay without clothes on top

his blanket. I was shocked by his cadaverous face and skeleton-like

body. He was not even the shell of a man. He was merely the structure

of a man, the bones of a man, still cohering, stripped practically of

all flesh and covered with a parchment-like skin.

Not until back in my own cell and consciousness was I able to mull the

thing over and realize that just as was Jake Oppenheimer, so was Ed

Morrell, so was I. And I could not but thrill as I glimpsed the

vastitude of spirit that inhabited these frail, perishing carcasses of

us—the three incorrigibles of solitary. Flesh is a cheap, vain thing.

Grass is flesh, and flesh becomes grass; but the spirit is the thing

that abides and survives. I have no patience with these

flesh-worshippers. A taste of solitary in San Quentin would swiftly

convert them to a due appreciation and worship of the spirit.

But to return to my experience in Oppenheimer’s cell. His body was that

of a man long dead and shrivelled by desert heat. The skin that covered

it was of the colour of dry mud. His sharp, yellow-gray eyes seemed the

only part of him that was alive. They were never at rest. He lay on his

back, and the eyes darted hither and thither, following the flight of

the several flies that disported in the gloomy air above him. I noted,

too, a scar, just above his right elbow, and another scar on his right

ankle.

After a time he yawned, rolled over on his side, and inspected an

angry-looking sore just above his hip. This he proceeded to cleanse and

dress by the crude methods men in solitary must employ. I recognized

the sore as one of the sort caused by the strait-jacket. On my body, at

this moment of writing, are hundreds of scars of the jacket.

Next, Oppenheimer rolled on his back, gingerly took one of his front

upper teeth—an eye tooth—between thumb and forefinger, and

consideratively moved it back and forth. Again he yawned, stretched his

arms, rolled over, and knocked the call to Ed Morrell.

I read the code as a matter of course.

“Thought you might be awake,” Oppenheimer tapped. “How goes it with the

Professor?”

Then, dim and far, I could hear Morrell’s taps enunciating that they

had put me in the jacket an hour before, and that, as usual, I was

already deaf to all knuckle talk.

“He is a good guy,” Oppenheimer rapped on. “I always was suspicious of

educated mugs, but he ain’t been hurt none by his education. He is sure

square. Got all the spunk in the world, and you could not get him to

squeal or double cross in a million years.”

To all of which, and with amplification, Ed Morrell agreed. And I must,

right here, ere I go a word further, say that I have lived many years

and many lives, and that in those many lives I have known proud

moments; but that the proudest moment I have ever known was the moment

when my two comrades in solitary passed this appraisal of me. Ed

Morrell and Jake Oppenheimer were great spirits, and in all time no

greater honour was ever accorded me than this admission of me to their

comradeship. Kings have knighted me, emperors have ennobled me, and, as

king myself, I have known stately moments. Yet of it all nothing do I

adjudge so splendid as this accolade delivered by two lifers in

solitary deemed by the world as the very bottom-most of the human

cesspool.

Afterwards, recuperating from this particular bout with the jacket, I

brought up my visit to Jake’s cell as a proof that my spirit did leave

my body. But Jake was unshakable.

“It is guessing that is more than guessing,” was his reply, when I had

described to him his successive particular actions at the time my

spirit had been in his cell. “It is figuring. You have been close to

three years in solitary yourself, Professor, and you can come pretty

near to figuring what any guy will do to be killing time. There ain’t a

thing you told me that you and Ed ain’t done thousands of times, from

lying with your clothes off in hot weather to watching flies, tending

sores, and rapping.”

Morrell sided with me, but it was no use.

“Now don’t take it hard, Professor,” Jake tapped. “I ain’t saying you

lied. I just say you get to dreaming and figuring in the jacket without

knowing you’re doing it. I know you believe what you say, and that you

think it happened; but it don’t buy nothing with me. You figure it, but

you don’t know you figure it—that is something you know all the time,

though you don’t know you know it until you get into them dreamy, woozy

states.”

“Hold on, Jake,” I tapped. “You know I have never seen you with my own

eyes. Is that right?”

“I got to take your word for it, Professor. You might have seen me and

not known it was me.”

“The point is,” I continued, “not having seen you with your clothes

off, nevertheless I am able to tell you about that scar above your

right elbow, and that scar on your right ankle.”

“Oh, shucks,” was his reply. “You’ll find all that in my prison

description and along with my mug in the rogues’ gallery. They is

thousands of chiefs of police and detectives know all that stuff.”

“I never heard of it,” I assured him.

“You don’t remember that you ever heard of it,” he corrected. “But you

must have just the same. Though you have forgotten about it, the

information is in your brain all right, stored away for reference, only

you’ve forgot where it is stored. You’ve got to get woozy in order to

remember.”

“Did you ever forget a man’s name you used to know as well as your own

brother’s? I have. There was a little juror that convicted me in

Oakland the time I got handed my fifty-years. And one day I found I’d

forgotten his name. Why, bo, I lay here for weeks puzzling for it. Now,

just because I could not dig it out of my memory box was no sign it was

not there. It was mislaid, that was all. And to prove it, one day, when

I was not even thinking about it, it popped right out of my brain to

the tip of my tongue. ‘Stacy,’ I said right out loud. ‘Joseph Stacy.’

That was it. Get my drive?

“You only tell me about them scars what thousands of men know. I don’t

know how you got the information, I guess you don’t know yourself. That

ain’t my lookout. But there she is. Telling me what many knows buys

nothing with me. You got to deliver a whole lot more than that to make

me swallow the rest of your whoppers.”

Hamilton’s Law of Parsimony in the weighing of evidence! So

intrinsically was this slum-bred convict a scientist, that he had

worked out Hamilton’s law and rigidly applied it.

And yet—and the incident is delicious—Jake Oppenheimer was

intellectually honest. That night, as I was dozing off, he called me

with the customary signal.

“Say, Professor, you said you saw me wiggling my loose tooth. That has

got my goat. That is the one thing I can’t figure out any way you could

know. It only went loose three days ago, and I ain’t whispered it to a

soul.”