9009/Chapter 4
To hold his copper and to keep to himself—the sheriff knew what he was saying when he had coupled these admonitions. 9009 learned this through several months of silent observation.
He learned, during that time, many things about guards and convicts. First, he found that there were two classes of convicts—the ordinary convict and the trusty. He wondered much at the trusties. He saw them all over the prison. A trusty had supervision of the cells in his tier. A trusty superintended the waiters of the dining-hall. The druggist to whom one morning 9009 went for quinine was striped. Convicts kept the prison records. Convicts kept the keys of the cell houses. A murderer serving life sentence had in his charge nearly all the keys inside the wall.
That the prison officials should trust a felon to the point of placing in his hands the power to free all his fellows was a cause of wonder to 9009. He wondered when he found that another stripes-clad man was allowed to go on errands to the neighbouring town unattended. And he marvelled at the fewness of the guards. Fifty of the fifteen hundred inmates could have overpowered with ease all the blue-clad guards within sight at one time, were fifty to act in concert.
He watched and wondered, and these were slow months. Without knowing it, he had begun to let his shoulders droop, and he shuffled slightly now when he walked. Amid many of his kind, he moved alone, silently watching. Daily he saw blue-clad guards carrying loaded rifles. He heard each evening heavy bolts fall loudly into sockets. Each morning he woke to the faint taint in the air.
He rose at six to the resounding clang of a gong in the corridor. The rattle of released locks and jerked bolts was followed by the grate of opening doors, and the convicts, flowing out into the corridors, spent fifteen minutes cleaning them and cleaning their cells. For that time, speaking was allowed; and 9009 noted how some of the stripes-clad men slipped, in passing, stealthy words from moveless lips; gathered about the sinks, others gibed each other cruelly; but some, their eyes on the floor always, muttered to themselves without cease. There was fifteen minutes of this, then, at the gong’s stroke, the men, suddenly petrified into silence—the silence that was to last through the day—marched out to the dining-hall. From now on no speech was allowed. Silently each man stepped out of his cell, and placed his hands upon the shoulders of the man ahead of him, forming the lock-step line. The guard—he was a grizzled blue-eyed fellow who had lived most of his life in prison—unarmed as were all the guards who worked within reach of the convicts, waited till they were in formation, and then unlocked the door at the bottom of the corridor. With a hissing of feet upon the concrete, the line moved smoothly forward, through this door, into a long outer corridor closed by a steel-barred gate from the yard. The guard, striding ahead, took position at this gate, then, when the line had reached him and had halted compressed and orderly before him, he opened it, letting the linked men out into the yard, under the shadow of the walls, with their pacing guards. Usually, though, at this morning hour, the guards were few.
In the dining-hall, the striped felon who had charge of the waiters commanded the line by signals, halting it at the door, then signing it to advance until the convicts were at their places at the tables, which extended the room’s length. At another signal, the striped men sat down and began to eat silently. At each end of the hall, overhead in a small barred gallery, a guard stood, holding a rifle, watching the dumb eaters.
They rose from their places at a final signal and, re-forming, crawled outside. 9009, now, was a link, a vertebra, in the monstrous thing. He touched two shoulders before him; he felt two hands touching his shoulders behind. The line crept through the upper yard, along a track beaten as if into stone by its eternal passings, to the gates beneath the turret with its long, wicked muzzle of rapid-fire gun. The gates opened, and it filed out into a lane, between fences twenty feet high, made of barbed wire, to the jute-mill.
They worked without speech in the jute-mill, but 9009 saw some of the convicts, passing . among the looms on errands, steal words, sliding them through lips that remained motionless in their down-turned faces. He stood before a whirring loom. At the height of his eyes, behind the multitudinous perpendicular lines of the warp, a clacking shuttle fled swiftly from right to left, from left to right, in unceasing flight. Whenever a thread of warp or whoof broke he had to retie it quickly; whenever the shuttle became bare, he dipped his hand into a basket kept filled by another convict and drew a new one, threading it into place. This is all he had to do—tie strings and change shuttles. The machine did everything else. Started by the mill superintendent—an old Scotchman, the only man in the prison that wore no uniform—it whirred on hour after hour, holding his rigid attention, the clacking shuttle fleeing back and forth before his eyes in incessant flight, till the superintendent, pressing a button, brought it finally to rest and freed him from its exactions.
Across the aisle from 9009, at another loom, stood the red-striped convict whom he had seen in the line the day he had entered the prison; and it was the garotter, with whom he had come in, who had charge of keeping the baskets filled with threaded shuttles. When the garotter had been assigned to this work, a scene incomprehensible to 9009 had taken place. The garotter had pleaded against the order; little beads of sweat had welled up on his forehead; he had almost knelt to Jennings, standing there impassive, his light whip in hand. It had taken the latter’s threat of solitary confinement to break the man’s resistance.
At noon, the striped line crept to the dining-hall and after the meal crept back to the jute-mill. At five o’clock it crept to supper, then to the cell-house, and all the time it had been dumb. Locked in their cells now, the convicts were again allowed to speak. Cell-mate spoke to cell-mate, quietly; friends threw jocular remarks through the bars; and sometimes enemy reviled enemy in words crawling as with vermin. At counting bell they stood up with faces against the bars while a guard passed, scanning them. At nine o’clock the lights went out abruptly, all save two in the corridor. Then whispered murmurings sounded vague through the shadows, and the guard slipped silently along the tier-walks. The sound of heavy breathing succeeded. And 9009, lying on his back in his bunk, calculated the days, added to the days that were gone, subtracted from the days that were left, and his arms, folding themselves in a weary gesture, seemed to hug to his breast his copper.
The routine changed on Sundays. Twice a month the tenants of the cell houses went out into the yard for a few hours’ recess; and twice a month, alternating, came chapel.
The chapel was a long bare room with whitewashed walls and a low ceiling supported by yellow posts. One of these posts, near the doors, had stapled into it, a little more than man-height from the ground, a single big iron ring. Just above this ring, the yellow paint was soiled with an oily smudge, spreading fan-wise, in which showed vague imprints of fingers and thumbs; and the floor immediately below was white and smooth, as if from many scrubbings. This post, on week days, was the prison’s whipping-post.
The convicts might see visitors, on chapel-days, in a space set apart for this, near the office of the captain of the yard. But no one came to see 9009. And he did not care. He was becoming more and more absorbed in the earning of his copper, absorbed like a miser hoarding gold piece by piece. At times he thought of Nell—but without expectation, in a detached manner. His experience led him to expect nothing of her kind. “Probably hooked up with some guy long ago,” was the mental remark with which he usually dismissed thought of her.
Lying in his bunk one night, he was startled by a new and disturbing note in the noise of the sleeping prison, now so familiar to him. It was a rasp, a faint scratching, a rubbing of metal upon metal. He listened; after a while he made sure of the sound. It was the purring rasp of a saw rubbing metal, and it came from the cell next to his.
He knew the two in this cell—knew them from watching them as he watched all the others; they were ugly fellows, who always kept to themselves savagely. And now they were sawing the bars! He sat up on his elbow, listening, his heart a-pound with a contagion of excitement.
A voice reached him, a low voice of warning; there was a moving of bodies, a sly creaking of bunks; then along the steel gang-way passed a shadowy guard, his rubber shoes at each step giving a little hiss. A silence followed, or, rather, the noise of the sleeping prison, a heavy animal breathing broken by gurglings and uncouth snorings, but conformant and familiar, free from the startling new note.
But the next night, and for many succeeding nights after, 9009 heard it again—the furtive purr of saw upon bar, then the low murmur of warning, and, along the gang-way, the slight hiss of the guard’s rubber shoes. And one noon he saw one of his hard-eyed neighbours snatch a piece of meat from the dining-table and conceal it within his blouse; he saw him repeat this on the following day. They must be ready for the break, the break that would lead them to freedom—or to death. Listening to the saw that night (its rasp was sharper that night, vibrant with a new impatience) 9009 suddenly thought of his copper.
He might be blamed for this; he might be punished for having known; he might lose it, his copper.
The idea of betrayal, however, did not even cross his mind. And the next morning, he learned all about the trusties.
As, at cleaning time, he passed the cell from which had come the sound of sawing, he saw inside of it the trusty who was cell-tender. The man—a lean fellow with pale-blue eyes and red hair—was stooping over the lower bunk, his hand underneath the blankets.
And that night the cell was empty, and soon there went around the prison the news that the guards had taken from the bunks in this cell a revolver and provisions, and had found the bars sawed nearly through. A great light had come to 9009.
It was the trusties! They guarded the convicts. They, it was, and not the guards, who were the gaolers. And the guards need not watch them; they watched each other. They were informers. They obtained their jobs, with the privileges that went with them, by betrayal; and they held them just so long as they did Judas work. He understood now why they had rat eyes.
The whole system lay open before him. It was a system of vast espionage, of stalking, of spying, of treachery, of betrayal. He himself was being constantly watched, watched with malevolent hope that he might stumble. Confidence in any one, of course, was impossible (he laughed as he thought of his former wonder at the absence of concerted breaks). He must stay alone, trust no one, speak to no one, isolate himself. The sheriff had spoken true; “good old boy,” he now thought, almost with tenderness.
This new knowledge dictated his conduct when, a few days later, he was given a cell-mate (up to this time he had been alone in his cell). Returning from the dining-hall after the evening meal, he found a little bent striped man, with spiky white hair, sitting on the edge of his bunk. The little man sprang to his feet as 9009 entered. “That’s your bunk, ain’t it,” he said in a wheezy voice; “mine’s the up one, ain’t it?”
9009 stared at him, scowling. The little man’s face was black with a mixture of dust and oil that clogged the pores; his eyes were inflamed, and the lower lids drooped, showing the red linings.
“You’re going to be in this cell?” at last asked 9009.
“They put me here,” answered the little man humbly. “My old mate, he’s shoe-trusty now.”
9009’s defiance bristled at the word. Pushing the little man aside, he threw himself on his bunk, his face to the wall. After a time he heard him climb carefully into the upper bunk—then a fit of hacking cough came to his ears.
Several times, during the night, 9009 found himself awake, listening to this dry, hacking sound, and each time he thought of the new problem before him. When morning came, he had his mind made up.
“You sweep, and I make up the bunk,” he said harshly to the new cell-mate. “Next week, you make up the bunk and Isweep. And”—his voice rose—“I don’t talk to you, and you don’t talk to me—understand? I don’t want to talk, and I don’t want to listen, so don’t you open your trap—understand?”
“All right,” answered the little man, looking scared, and nodding his head meekly.