AFTER being dead twenty years,he walked out into the sunshine.
It was as if the bones of a bleached skele-ton should join themselves on some forgotten plain,and look about them for the vanished flesh.
To be dead it is not necessary to be in the grave.There are places where the worms creep about the heart instead of the body.
The penitentiary is one of these.
David Culross had been in the penitentiary twenty years.Now,with that worm-eaten heart,he came out into liberty and looked about him for the habiliments with which he had formerly clothed himself,--for hope,self-respect,courage,pugnacity,and industry.
But they had vanished and left no trace,like the flesh of the dead men on the plains,and so,morally unapparelled,in the hideous skeleton of his manhood,he walked on down the street under the mid-June sunshine.
You can understand,can you not,how a skeleton might wish to get back into its comfortable grave?David Culross had not walked two blocks before he was seized with an almost uncontrollable desire to beg to be shielded once more in that safe and shameful retreat from which he had just been released.A horrible perception of the largeness of the world swept over him.
Space and eternity could seem no larger to the usual man than earth --that snug and insignificant planet --looked to David Culross.
"If I go back,"he cried,despairingly,looking up to the great building that arose above the stony hills,"they will not take me in."He was absolutely without a refuge,utterly without a destination;he did not have a hope.There was nothing he desired except the surrounding of those four narrow walls between which he had lain at night and dreamed those ever-recurring dreams,--dreams which were never prophecies or promises,but always the hackneyed history of what he had sacrificed by his crime,and relinquished by his pride.
The men who passed him looked at him with mingled amusement and pity.They knew the "prison look,"and they knew the prison clothes.For though the State gives to its discharged convicts clothes which are like those of other men,it makes a hundred suits from the same sort of cloth.The police know the fabric,and even the citizens recognize it.But,then,were each man dressed in different garb he could not be disguised.Every one knows in what dull school that sidelong glance is learned,that aimless drooping of the shoulders,that rhythmic lifting of the heavy foot.
David Culross wondered if his will were dead.He put it to the test.He lifted up his head to a position which it had not held for many miserable years.He put his hands in his pockets in a pitiful attempt at non-chalance,and walked down the street with a step which was meant to be brisk,but which was in fact only uncertain.In his pocket were ten dollars.This much the State equips a man with when it sends him out of its penal halls.It gives him also transportation to any point within reasonable distance that he may desire to reach.Cul-ross had requested a ticket to Chicago.He naturally said Chicago.In the long color-less days it had been in Chicago that all those endlessly repeated scenes had been laid.Walking up the street now with that wavering ineffectual gait,these scenes came back to surge in his brain like waters cease-lessly tossed in a wind-swept basin.
There was the office,bare and clean,where the young stoop-shouldered clerks sat writ-ing.In their faces was a strange resem-blance,just as there was in the backs of the ledgers,and in the endless bills on the spindles.If one of them laughed,it was not with gayety,but with gratification at the discomfiture of another.None of them ate well.None of them were rested after sleep.All of them rode on the stuffy one-horse cars to and from their work.Sun-days they lay in bed very late,and ate more dinner than they could digest.There was a certain fellowship among them,--such fel-lowship as a band of captives among canni-bals might feel,each of them waiting with vital curiosity to see who was the next to be eaten.But of that fellowship that plans in unison,suffers in sympathy,enjoys vicari-ously,strengthens into friendship and com-munion of soul they knew nothing.Indeed,such camaraderie would have been disap-proved of by the Head Clerk.He would have looked on an emotion with exactly the same displeasure that he would on an error in the footing of the year's accounts.It was tacitly understood that one reached the proud position of Head Clerk by having no emotions whatever.
Culross did not remember having been born with a pen in his hand,or even with one behind his ear;but certainly from the day he had been let out of knickerbockers his con-stant companion had been that greatly over-estimated article.His father dying at a time that cut short David's school-days,he went out armed with his new knowledge of double-entry,determined to make a fortune and a commercial name.Meantime,he lived in a suite of three rooms on West Madison Street with his mother,who was a good woman,and lived where she did that she might be near her favorite meeting-house.She prayed,and cooked bad dinners,principally composed of dispiriting pastry.Her idea of house-keeping was to keep the shades down,whatever happened;and when David left home in the evening for any purpose of pleasure,she wept.David persuaded him-self that he despised amusement,and went to bed each night at half-past nine in a folding bedstead in the front room,and,by becoming absolutely stolid from mere vege-tation,imagined that he was almost fit to be a Head Clerk.
Walking down the street now after the twenty years,thinking of these dead but inno-cent days,this was the picture he saw;and as he reflected upon it,even the despoiled and desolate years just passed seemed richer by contrast.
