Странник по звездам / The Star-Rover
Шрифт:
I had had my own experiences. At the present moment half a thousand scars mark my body. They go to the scaffold with me.
Perhaps, dear citizen, you are unacquainted with the jacket. Let me describe, it, so that you will understand the method by which I achieved death in life, became a temporary master of time and space, and vaulted the prison walls to rove among the stars.
Imagine a piece of stout canvas, some four and one-half feet in length, with large and heavy brass eyelets running down both edges. The width of this canvas is never the full girth of the human body it is to surround. The width is also irregular—broadest at the shoulders, next broadest at the hips, and narrowest at the waist.
The jacket is spread on the floor. The man is told to lie face-downward on the flat canvas. If he refuses, he is beaten. After that he lays himself down with a will.
So, the man lies face-downward. The edges of the jacket are brought as nearly together as possible along the centre of the man’s back. Then a rope is run through the eyelets, and on the principle of a shoe-lacing the man is laced in the canvas. Only he is laced more severely than any person ever laces his shoe. In order to insure the severity of the lacing, the guards press with their feet into the man’s back as they draw the lacing tight.
Try to imagine your whole body laced very tightly, and the squeeze is on your entire trunk, compressing your heart, your lungs, and all the rest of your vital and essential organs.
I remember the first time they gave me the jacket down in the dungeons. It was at the beginning of my incorrigibility, shortly after my entrance to prison, when I was weaving my loom-task of a hundred yards a day in the jute-mill and finishing two hours ahead of the average day. I was sent to the jacket that first time, according to the prison books, because of “skips” and “breaks” in the cloth, in short, because my work was defective. Of course this was ridiculous. In truth, I was sent to the jacket because I, a new convict, told the stupid head weaver a few things he did not know about his business. And my punishment was twenty-four hours in the jacket.
They took me down into the dungeons. I was ordered to lie face-downward on the canvas spread flat upon the floor. I refused. They began to beat me. In the end I lay down. And they laced me extra tight. Then they rolled me over like a log upon my back.
When they closed my door, with clang and clash, and left me in the utter dark, it was eleven o’clock in the morning. My heart began to thump and my lungs seemed unable to draw sufficient air for my blood. This sense of suffocation was terrorizing.
I began to cry out, to yell, to scream, to howl, in a very madness of dying. The trouble was the pain that had arisen in my heart. It was a sharp, definite pain, similar to that of pleurisy.
To die is not a difficult thing, but to die in such slow and horrible fashion was maddening. I experienced ecstasies of fear, and yelled and howled until I realized that such vocal exercise merely consumed much of the little air in my lungs.
I lay quiet for a long time—an eternity it seemed then, though now I am confident that it could have been no longer than a quarter of an hour. Again I lost control of myself and set up a mad howling for help.
In the midst of this I heard a voice from the next dungeon.
“Shut up [25] ,” it shouted. “Shut up. You make me tired.”
“I’m dying,” I cried out.
“Forget it,” was the reply.
“But I am dying,” I insisted.
“Then why worry?” came the voice. “Go ahead, but don’t make so much noise about it. You’re interrupting my beauty sleep.”
I recovered self-control and was only groaning.
“How am I going to get some sleep?” my neighbour complained. “I’m not happier than you. My jacket’s just as tight as yours, and I want to sleep and forget it.”
25
shut up –
“How long have you been in?” I asked, thinking him a new-comer compared to the centuries I had already suffered.
“Since day before yesterday,” was his answer.
“I mean in the jacket,” I amended.
“Since day before yesterday, brother.”
“My God!” I screamed.
“Yes, brother, fifty straight hours, and I don’t complain about it. They cinched me with their feet in my back. I am some tight, believe me. You haven’t been in an hour yet.”
“I’ve been in hours and hours,” I protested.
“Brother, you may think so, but it’s not true. I heard them lacing you.”
This was incredible. Already, in less than an hour, I had died a thousand deaths. And yet this neighbour, balanced and equable and calm-voiced had been in the jacket fifty hours!
“How much longer are they going to keep you in?” I asked.
“The Lord only knows. Captain Jamie won’t let me out until I’m about to die. Now, brother, I’m going to give you the tip. The only way is to forget it. Just remember every girl you ever knew.”
That man was a robber from Philadelphia. I lived through my twenty-four hours, and I have never been the same man since. Oh, I don’t mean physically, although next morning, when they unlaced me, I was semi-paralyzed. I was a changed man mentally, morally. The brute physical torture was humiliation and affront to my spirit and to my sense of justice. My God—when I think of the things men have done to me! Twenty-four hours in the jacket!
I write these lines today in 1913, and today men are lying in the jacket in the dungeons of San Quentin. I shall never forget my friend from Philadelphia. He had then been seventy-four hours in the jacket.
“Well, brother, you’re still alive,” he called to me, as I was dragged from my cell into the corridor of dungeons.
“Shut up, you,” the sergeant snarled at him.
“Forget it,” was the retort.
“I’ll get you [26] ,” the sergeant threatened.
“Think so?” the robber queried sweetly. “Why, you couldn’t get anything. You couldn’t get a free lunch, if it wasn’t your brother’s help.”
It was admirable—the spirit of man rising above the hurt.
26
I’ll get you – я до тебя доберусь