Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison: Fifteen Years in Solitude
IN MOOD AS LONELY, IN PLIGHT AS DESPERATE AS HIS.
I have related how, the Sunday after my sentence, in my despair I took
the little Bible off the shelf. The other books I had at Chatham besides
the Bible were a dictionary and "The Life of the Prophet Jeremiah."
Once, soon after my arrival in Chatham, I took the Jeremiah down from
the shelf, but speedily put it back and made a vow never to take it down
again; and I never did. It remained in view on the little shelf for
nineteen years, while I sat there watching it rot away. The dictionary
is a good book, but grows tiresome at times. As for the Bible, there is
no discount on that. For fourteen years I was a careful student of its
sacred pages. Every Sunday of that fourteen years, from 12 o'clock until
2, I used to walk the stone floor of my cell preaching a sermon with no
audience but my dictionary and "The Life of the Prophet Jeremiah." I at
first began my Bible studies and my sermons as a means to occupy my
thoughts and keep my mind bright. It saved my life and reason. I need
hardly say that I became tolerably familiar with the book, and I had the
great advantage of studying the Bible without a commentary.
I thought in my enthusiasm I should never tire of the Bible, but after
ten or twelve years I began to grow weary of it, and grew very hungry
for other mental food. I wanted a Shakespeare, for with him to keep me
company I could no longer be in the desolation of solitude. At last I
determined to get my friends to try for me. I had learned the Bible
almost by heart; the smallest incidents in the life of the Prophet
Jeremiah were much more familiar to me than the history of the civil
war, and Anathoth took on proportions which made it as real as New York
and far more important. The desperate efforts I had made to keep myself
from falling into the condition of so many I had seen drooping to idiocy
and death were, I felt, successful, and any occupation which kept alive
the intellect could not but be beneficial. I was hungry, starving for
mental food. Never had books appeared so attractive, never was kingdom
so cheerfully offered for a horse as I would have offered mine for an
octavo. My friends had written for me to the Government, but with no
success. At last they had interested the American Minister in London,
who promised to write to the Home Secretary for me, but a year had
slipped by and I had heard nothing.
Jeremiah continued with me, and it seemed he was to remain with me to
the end. But a change was coming.
Can I ever forget the day it happened! Can I ever cease to remember the
delight, the incredulity, the astonishment of that happy day! I had come
in at night hungry, cold, wet and miserable. I made my way a little
depressed to my cell. As I was about to step across the threshold I saw
a book lying on my little wooden bed. Amazed and astonished, I hesitated
to enter. Small as such a circumstance appears, the very sight of the
book brought on a weakness. I feared to pick it up, a horrible dread
seized me that it might be a new Bible, and I was unwilling to risk
another disappointment. The footprint on the sand was not more
suggestive nor more awe-inspiring to Robinson Crusoe than the appearance
of that book was to me. In mood as lonely, in plight as desperate as
his, there lay before me a sight as unlooked for and, as it seemed, as
full of meaning as the footprint was to Robinson.
At last I pulled myself together, determined to end the suspense and
know what was before me. I picked up the book, and who can understand
the delight, the joy, the rapture even, with which I read on the title
page, "The Works of William Shakespeare." In an instant I became a new
man. If ever one human being felt gratitude to another I felt it at that
moment for the American Minister. To him I owed it that henceforth a new
light was to stream through the fluted glass of my window, that
henceforth a new world was opened up for me to live in, and the world
seemed lighter to me. Many a month and year afterward my cell was filled
and my heart cheered by the multitude of friends the divine William
provided for me.
About the time I received my Shakespeare another piece of happy fortune
befell me. A smallpox scare was existing outside, and all hands in the
prison were ordered to be vaccinated. When the doctor came around a few
days afterward to examine the effects of the operation he found my arm
so swollen that he directed me to be taken to the hospital.
For twenty-five days I had full opportunity to learn what the girl in
Dickens' "Little Dorritt" meant when she called the hospital an
"'eavenly" place. It was the first time I had ever been admitted, and
the change from the horrible mud hole to the rest and comfort of a cell
in the hospital was indeed almost "'eavenly." With nothing to do but to
read my Shakespeare, the cravings of hunger for the first time since my
imprisonment satisfied, I was tempted to believe--I did partly
believe--that the world had few positions pleasanter than mine.
Godliness with contentment is undoubtedly great gain. Contentment alone
without the godliness is no poor thing, and was I not content? Few,
indeed, of all the thousands who have toiled in that torturing prison
house have ever been or are likely ever to be so content as I was.
How true it is that happiness is altogether relative, and that it is
divided much more evenly among men than we are willing to believe! A
mere respite from an intolerable position, a single book to keep the
mind from cracking, transformed gloom and misery into light and at least
comparative happiness.
After a time I began to watch the effects of the unnatural life upon
others. They arrived full of resolution, buoyed often by hopes which
they were soon destined to find delusive. The short-time men, those with
seven or ten year sentences, could face the prospect hopefully. To them
the day would come when the prison gate must swing back and the path to
the world be open once more. But no such hope cheers the long-timers,
the men with twenty years and life, who quickly learn how great the
proportion is of their number who find relief only in the box smeared
with black which incloses what is left of them in the grave. Every day I
used to see the effects on them of hunger and torment of mind. The first
part visibly affected was the neck. The flesh shrinks, disappears and
leaves what look like two artificial props to support the head. As time
wears on the erect posture grows bent; instead of standing up straight
the knees bulge outward as though unable to support the body's weight,
and the man drags himself along in a kind of despondent shuffle. Another
year or two and his shoulders are bent forward. He carries his arms
habitually before him now, he has grown moody, seldom speaks to any one,
nor answers if spoken to. In the general deterioration of the body the
mind keeps equal step; and so unfailing is the effect that even warders
wait to see it, and remark to each other that so and so is "going off."
When the sufferer begins to carry his arms in front every one
understands that the end is coming. The projecting head, the sunken eye,
the fixed, expressionless features are merely the outward exponents of
the hopeless, sullen brooding within. Sometimes the man merely keeps on
in that way, wasting more and more, body and mind, every day, until at
last he drops and is carried into the infirmary to come out no more.
Truly I was looking on life from the seamy side.
Before my own experience had taught me I used to think at times when
such a subject ever came into my mind at all: "What must be the thoughts
and anticipations of a man condemned to separation from other men, to
lead an unnatural life under the strained and artificial conditions of
prison?" The change is so violent, it comes so suddenly, the unknown
possibilities are so terrible, the sufferings naturally implied are so
inevitable, that had any one gifted with a knowledge of futurity shown
me that such experience was to be mine I would have thought it utterly
impossible that such horrors could be withstood by ordinary strength.
The delights of pleasure are seldom equal to the anticipation of them,
and it is probable that the pain of suffering is more unbearable in the
shrinking expectation than when affliction actually opens her furnace
door and commands us to enter. Perhaps there is a compensation of some
kind in nature, a provision to deaden feeling when a death stroke
falls--some merciful dispensation by which we fail to realize or to
understand in its exactness the meaning of the stroke which is crushing
us.
The man rescued from drowning or from asphyxiation has felt no pain. The
animal that falls beneath the rush and the murderous claws of a beast of
prey seems to fall into a torpor-like indifference, under the influence
of which he meets with no great suffering the death his captor brings
him. Probably all great suffering comes accompanied with a reserve of
strength or with a power of resistance which may even spring from
weakness, but which invests the sufferer with courage, and perhaps, too,
with hope, to meet it. [Transcriber's note: words are missing here on
the original] but the pitiless application of a discipline designed with
consummate skill to find out all the weak points of a man's inner armor
and to inflict the utmost possible suffering upon him, I used to ask
myself if it could be possible that I was really the man upon whom so
hideous a fate had fallen.
The blackness of darkness was round about me. Infinite despair stood
ready to seize me. It seemed an amazement that life should be forced to
remain with him who longs for death, who would rejoice exceedingly and
be glad could he find the grave. But when the first horrible numbness of
the shock was disappearing, when the first glimmering perception came to
me that "as a man's day so shall his strength be," I began to suspect,
and soon to know, that in many ways the reality was not so terrible as
imagination pictured it.
However ample the provision be which men may make to inflict suffering
upon other men, however well and successfully they may apply the
provision, they cannot alter men's nature. That will assert itself under
all circumstances. The fact that a man is restrained of his liberty by
no means alters his nature. The things he liked or disliked when he was
at liberty he will like or dislike when a prisoner, and he is not long
in finding that "whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap" is
just as certainly true of the seed he plants in inclosed ground as it is
of what he scatters in the open field.
CHAPTER XLVI.
IF PAIN IS NOT AN EVIL, IT CERTAINLY IS A VERY GOOD IMITATION.
The world inside of the walls has a public opinion of its own, and it is
at least quite as often just as the public opinion whose sphere is not
circumscribed by stone walls and iron bars. The man who accepts the
situation, resolved to get his hand as easily as possible out of the
tiger's mouth, soon becomes known as a sensible fellow, willing to give
others no trouble and anxious to have no trouble given him. Such a man
will rarely be molested.
Patient, uncomplaining endurance always excites pity and sympathy. The
most ignorant, the most brutal warder will scarcely oppress the man who
goes quietly and unresistingly along the thorny road stretched out
before him; who, not taking the thorns for roses, is not disappointed at
finding few roses among the thorns.
Those, however, who are determined to see the rough side of prison life
may easily do so; the appliances are there and they will certainly be
accommodated. An English prison is a vast machine in which a man counts
for just nothing at all. He is to the establishment what a bale of