Page:Life of John Boyle O'Reilly.djvu/88

54 I had been in prison about eight months—all the time in solitary confinement—before I was brought "cheek by jowl" with the regular criminals. I confess I had a fear of the first plunge into the sea of villainous association; but my army experience rendered the immersion easier for me than for many others who had been dragged to confinement from the purity of a happy home. I was in separate confinement in Millbank, and I suppose it is necessary to explain, for the benefit of those who never had the good fortune to live in a prison, that separate confinement means that the convict so sentenced is to be shut up in his cell with light work, sewing or picking coir, and to have one hour's exercise per day, which consists in walking in single file, with long distances between the prisoners, around the exercise yard, and then turning an immense crank, which pumps water into the corridors. The men stood at this crank facing each other, and the man facing me was a perfect type of the brutal English jail-bird. I had noticed the fellow in the chapel for three mornings previously, but this was the first day I had taken the regular exercise.

He was a man about thirty-five years of age, with a yellowish-white, corpse-like face, one of those faces on which whiskers never grow, and only a few long hairs in place of a mustache. Of course he, was closely shaven, but I felt that that was the nature of his whiskers when "outside." I had noticed, sitting behind this man as I did in chapel, almost directly in the rear of him, that I could see his eyes. He had a narrow, straight face, and there was a deep scoop, as it were, taken out of each bone where the forehead joined the cheek, and through this scoop I saw the eye from behind even more clearly than when standing in front of the man, for his brows overhung in a most forbidding way.

We had marched, Indian file, from our cells on my first morning's exercise, and had taken about three circuits of the yard when the officer shouted in a harsh, unfriendly tone, the prison order,—"Halt 1 File on to crank. No. 1."

No. 1 turned toward the center of the yard, where ran the series of cranks arranged with one handle for two men facing each other. When I got to my place I was face to face with the Corpse-man, and when he turned his head sideways, I saw his left eye through the scoop in his cheekbone. The officers stood behind me. There were three of them to the gang of twenty men, and their duty was to watch so that no communication took place between the prisoners. I felt that the Corpse-man wanted to talk to me, but he kept his hidden eyes on the officers behind me and turned the crank without the movement of a muscle of his face. Presently, I heard a whisper, "Mate," and I knew it must be he who spoke, although still not a muscle seemed to move.