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_ It was very lonely, at first, in solitary, and the hours were long.
Time was marked by the regular changing of the guards, and by the
alternation of day and night. Day was only a little light, but it
was better than the all-dark of the night. In solitary the day was
an ooze, a slimy seepage of light from the bright outer world.
Never was the light strong enough to read by. Besides, there was
nothing to read. One could only lie and think and think. And I was
a lifer, and it seemed certain, if I did not do a miracle, make
thirty-five pounds of dynamite out of nothing, that all the years of
my life would be spent in the silent dark.
My bed was a thin and rotten tick of straw spread on the cell floor.
One thin and filthy blanket constituted the covering. There was no
chair, no table--nothing but the tick of straw and the thin, aged
blanket. I was ever a short sleeper and ever a busy-brained man.
In solitary one grows sick of oneself in his thoughts, and the only
way to escape oneself is to sleep. For years I had averaged five
hours' sleep a night. I now cultivated sleep. I made a science of
it. I became able to sleep ten hours, then twelve hours, and, at
last, as high as fourteen and fifteen hours out of the twenty-four.
But beyond that I could not go, and, perforce, was compelled to lie
awake and think and think. And that way, for an active-brained man,
lay madness.
I sought devices to enable me mechanically to abide my waking hours.
I squared and cubed long series of numbers, and by concentration and
will carried on most astonishing geometric progressions. I even
dallied with the squaring of the circle . . . until I found myself
beginning to believe that that possibility could be accomplished.
Whereupon, realizing that there, too, lay madness, I forwent the
squaring of the circle, although I assure you it required a
considerable sacrifice on my part, for the mental exercise involved
was a splendid time-killer.
By sheer visualization under my eyelids I constructed chess-boards
and played both sides of long games through to checkmate. But when
I had become expert at this visualized game of memory the exercise
palled on me. Exercise it was, for there could be no real contest
when the same player played both sides. I tried, and tried vainly,
to split my personality into two personalities and to pit one
against the other. But ever I remained the one player, with no
planned ruse or strategy on one side that the other side did not
immediately apprehend.
And time was very heavy and very long. I played games with flies,
with ordinary houseflies that oozed into solitary as did the dim
gray light; and learned that they possessed a sense of play. For
instance, lying on the cell floor, I established an arbitrary and
imaginary line along the wall some three feet above the floor. When
they rested on the wall above this line they were left in peace.
The instant they lighted on the wall below the line I tried to catch
them. I was careful never to hurt them, and, in time, they knew as
precisely as did I where ran the imaginary line. When they desired
to play, they lighted below the line, and often for an hour at a
time a single fly would engage in the sport. When it grew tired, it
would come to rest on the safe territory above.
Of the dozen or more flies that lived with me, there was only one
who did not care for the game. He refused steadfastly to play, and,
having learned the penalty of alighting below the line, very
carefully avoided the unsafe territory. That fly was a sullen,
disgruntled creature. As the convicts would say, it had a "grouch"
against the world. He never played with the other flies either. He
was strong and healthy, too; for I studied him long to find out.
His indisposition for play was temperamental, not physical.
Believe me, I knew all my flies. It was surprising to me the
multitude of differences I distinguished between them. Oh, each was
distinctly an individual--not merely in size and markings, strength,
and speed of flight, and in the manner and fancy of flight and play,
of dodge and dart, of wheel and swiftly repeat or wheel and reverse,
of touch and go on the danger wall, or of feint the touch and alight
elsewhere within the zone. They were likewise sharply
differentiated in the minutest shades of mentality and temperament.
I knew the nervous ones, the phlegmatic ones. There was a little
undersized one that would fly into real rages, sometimes with me,
sometimes with its fellows. Have you ever seen a colt or a calf
throw up its heels and dash madly about the pasture from sheer
excess of vitality and spirits? Well, there was one fly--the
keenest player of them all, by the way--who, when it had alighted
three or four times in rapid succession on my taboo wall and
succeeded each time in eluding the velvet-careful swoop of my hand,
would grow so excited and jubilant that it would dart around and
around my head at top speed, wheeling, veering, reversing, and
always keeping within the limits of the narrow circle in which it
celebrated its triumph over me.
Why, I could tell well in advance when any particular fly was making
up its mind to begin to play. There are a thousand details in this
one matter alone that I shall not bore you with, although these
details did serve to keep me from being bored too utterly during
that first period in solitary. But one thing I must tell you. To
me it is most memorable--the time when the one with a grouch, who
never played, alighted in a moment of absent-mindedness within the
taboo precinct and was immediately captured in my hand. Do you
know, he sulked for an hour afterward.
And the hours were very long in solitary; nor could I sleep them all
away; nor could I while them away with house-flies, no matter how
intelligent. For house-flies are house-flies, and I was a man, with
a man's brain; and my brain was trained and active, stuffed with
culture and science, and always geared to a high tension of
eagerness to do. And there was nothing to do, and my thoughts ran
abominably on in vain speculations. There was my pentose and
methyl-pentose determination in grapes and wines to which I had
devoted my last summer vacation at the Asti Vineyards. I had all
but completed the series of experiments. Was anybody else going on
with it, I wondered; and if so, with what success?
You see, the world was dead to me. No news of it filtered in. The
history of science was making fast, and I was interested in a
thousand subjects. Why, there was my theory of the hydrolysis of
casein by trypsin, which Professor Walters had been carrying out in
his laboratory. Also, Professor Schleimer had similarly been
collaborating with me in the detection of phytosterol in mixtures of
animal and vegetable fats. The work surely was going on, but with
what results? The very thought of all this activity just beyond the
prison walls and in which I could take no part, of which I was never
even to hear, was maddening. And in the meantime I lay there on my
cell floor and played games with house-flies.
And yet all was not silence in solitary. Early in my confinement I
used to hear, at irregular intervals, faint, low tappings. From
farther away I also heard fainter and lower tappings. Continually
these tappings were interrupted by the snarling of the guard. On
occasion, when the tapping went on too persistently, extra guards
were summoned, and I knew by the sounds that men were being strait-
jacketed.
The matter was easy of explanation. I had known, as every prisoner
in San Quentin knew, that the two men in solitary were Ed Morrell
and Jake Oppenheimer. And I knew that these were the two men who
tapped knuckle-talk to each other and were punished for so doing.
That the code they used was simple I had not the slightest doubt,
yet I devoted many hours to a vain effort to work it out. Heaven
knows--it had to be simple, yet I could not make head nor tail of
it. And simple it proved to be, when I learned it; and simplest of
all proved the trick they employed which had so baffled me. Not
only each day did they change the point in the alphabet where the
code initialled, but they changed it every conversation, and, often,
in the midst of a conversation.
Thus, there came a day when I caught the code at the right initial,
listened to two clear sentences of conversation, and, the next time
they talked, failed to understand a word. But that first time!
"Say--Ed--what--would-- you--give--right--now--for--brown--papers--
and--a--sack--of--Bull--Durham!" asked the one who tapped from
farther away.
I nearly cried out in my joy. Here was communication! Here was
companionship! I listened eagerly, and the nearer tapping, which I
guessed must be Ed Morrell's, replied:
"I--would--do--twenty--hours--strait--in--the--jacket--for--a--five-
-cent--sack--"
Then came the snarling interruption of the guard: "Cut that out,
Morrell!"
It may be thought by the layman that the worst has been done to men
sentenced to solitary for life, and therefore that a mere guard has
no way of compelling obedience to his order to cease tapping.
But the jacket remains. Starvation remains. Thirst remains. Man-
handling remains. Truly, a man pent in a narrow cell is very
helpless.
So the tapping ceased, and that night, when it was next resumed, I
was all at sea again. By pre-arrangement they had changed the
initial letter of the code. But I had caught the clue, and, in the
matter of several days, occurred again the same initialment I had
understood. I did not wait on courtesy.
"Hello," I tapped
"Hello, stranger," Morrell tapped back; and, from Oppenheimer,
"Welcome to our city."
They were curious to know who I was, how long I was condemned to
solitary, and why I had been so condemned. But all this I put to
the side in order first to learn their system of changing the code
initial. After I had this clear, we talked. It was a great day,
for the two lifers had become three, although they accepted me only
on probation. As they told me long after, they feared I might be a
stool placed there to work a frame-up on them. It had been done
before, to Oppenheimer, and he had paid dearly for the confidence he
reposed in Warden Atherton's tool.
To my surprise--yes, to my elation be it said--both my fellow-
prisoners knew me through my record as an incorrigible. Even into
the living grave Oppenheimer had occupied for ten years had my fame,
or notoriety, rather, penetrated.
I had much to tell them of prison happenings and of the outside
world. The conspiracy to escape of the forty lifers, the search for
the alleged dynamite, and all the treacherous frame-up of Cecil
Winwood was news to them. As they told me, news did occasionally
dribble into solitary by way of the guards, but they had had nothing
for a couple of months. The present guards on duty in solitary were
a particularly bad and vindictive set.
Again and again that day we were cursed for our knuckle talking by
whatever guard was on. But we could not refrain. The two of the
living dead had become three, and we had so much to say, while the
manner of saying it was exasperatingly slow and I was not so
proficient as they at the knuckle game.
"Wait till Pie-Face comes on to-night," Morrell rapped to me. "He
sleeps most of his watch, and we can talk a streak."
How we did talk that night! Sleep was farthest from our eyes. Pie-
Face Jones was a mean and bitter man, despite his fatness; but we
blessed that fatness because it persuaded to stolen snatches of
slumber. Nevertheless our incessant tapping bothered his sleep and
irritated him so that he reprimanded us repeatedly. And by the
other night guards we were roundly cursed. In the morning all
reported much tapping during the night, and we paid for our little
holiday; for, at nine, came Captain Jamie with several guards to
lace us into the torment of the jacket. Until nine the following
morning, for twenty-four straight hours, laced and helpless on the
floor, without food or water, we paid the price for speech.
Oh, our guards were brutes! And under their treatment we had to
harden to brutes in order to live. Hard work makes calloused hands.
Hard guards make hard prisoners. We continued to talk, and, on
occasion, to be jacketed for punishment. Night was the best time,
and, when substitute guards chanced to be on, we often talked
through a whole shift.
Night and day were one with us who lived in the dark. We could
sleep any time, we could knuckle-talk only on occasion. We told one
another much of the history of our lives, and for long hours Morrell
and I have lain silently, while steadily, with faint, far taps,
Oppenheimer slowly spelled out his life-story, from the early years
in a San Francisco slum, through his gang-training, through his
initiation into all that was vicious, when as a lad of fourteen he
served as night messenger in the red light district, through his
first detected infraction of the laws, and on and on through thefts
and robberies to the treachery of a comrade and to red slayings
inside prison walls.
They called Jake Oppenheimer the "Human Tiger." Some cub reporter
coined the phrase that will long outlive the man to whom it was
applied. And yet I ever found in Jake Oppenheimer all the cardinal
traits of right humanness. He was faithful and loyal. I know of
the times he has taken punishment in preference to informing on a
comrade. He was brave. He was patient. He was capable of self-
sacrifice--I could tell a story of this, but shall not take the
time. And justice, with him, was a passion. The prison-killings
done by him were due entirely to this extreme sense of justice. And
he had a splendid mind. A life-time in prison, ten years of it in
solitary, had not dimmed his brain.
Morrell, ever a true comrade, too had a splendid brain. In fact,
and I who am about to die have the right to say it without incurring
the charge of immodesty, the three best minds in San Quentin from
the Warden down were the three that rotted there together in
solitary. And here at the end of my days, reviewing all that I have
known of life, I am compelled to the conclusion that strong minds
are never docile. The stupid men, the fearful men, the men ungifted
with passionate rightness and fearless championship--these are the
men who make model prisoners. I thank all gods that Jake
Oppenheimer, Ed Morrell, and I were not model prisoners. _
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