WITHIN the circle of the high grey wall is silence.
Under a square of sky cut by high grey buildings nothing is to be seen of Nature but the prisoners themselves, the men who guard the prisoners, and a cat who eats the prison mice.
This house of perfect silence is in perfect order, as though God Himself had been at work—no dirt, no hurry, no lingering, no laughter. It is all like a well-oiled engine that goes—without a notion why. And each human thing that moves within this circle goes, day after day, year after year—as he has been set to go. The sun rises and the sun goes down—so says tradition in the House of Silence.
In yellow clothing marked with arrows the inhabitants are working. Each when he came in here was measured, weighed, and sounded; and, according to the entries made against his number, he received his silent task, and the proper quantity of food to keep his body able to fulfil it. He resumes this silent task each day, and if his work be sedentary, paces for an hour the speckless gravel yard from a number painted on the wall to a number painted on a wall. Every morning, and on Sundays twice, he marches in silence to the chapel, and, in the voice that he has nearly lost, praises the silent God of prisoners; this is his debauch of speech. Then, on his avid ears the words of the preacher fall; and motionless, row on row he sits, in the sensual pleasure of this sound. But the words are void of sense, for the music of speech has drugged his hearing.
Before he was admitted to this House of Silence he had endured his six months’ utter solitude, and now, in the small white-washed space, with a black floor whence he has cleaned all dirt, he spends only fourteen hours out of the twenty-four alone, except on Sundays, when he spends twenty-one, because it is God’s day. He spends them walking up and down, muttering to himself, listening for sound, with his eyes on the little peephole in the door, through which he can be seen but cannot see. Above his mug and plate of shining tin, his stiff, black-bristled brush and a piece of soap, is raised a little pyramid of godly books; no sound or scent, no living thing, no spider even, only his sense of humour comes between him and his God. But nothing whatever comes between him and his walking up and down, his listening for sound, his lying with his face pressed to the floor; till darkness falls, that he may stare at it, and beg for sleep, the only friend of prisoners, to touch him with her wings. And so, from day to day, from week to week, and year to year, according to the number of the years set opposite the name that once was his.
The workshops of the House of Silence hear no sound but that of work; the men in yellow, with arrows marked on them, are busy with a fearful zest. Their hands and feet and eyes move all the time; their lips are still. And on these lips, from mouth to mouth is seen no smile—so perfect is the order.
And their faces have one look, as though they said: We care for nothing—nothing; we hope for nothing—nothing; we work like this for fear of horror! Their quick dull stare fastens on him who comes to watch their silence; and all their eyes, curious, resentful, furtive, have in the depths of them the same defiant meaning, as though they saw in their visitor the world out of which they have been thrown, the millions of the free, the millions not alone all day and every day, the millions who can talk; as though they saw Society, which bred them, nurtured them, and forced their steps to that exactly fitting point of physical or mental stress, out of which they found no way but the crime rewarded with these years of silence; as though they heard in the footsteps and the muttered questions of this casual intruder the whole pronouncement of man’s justice:
“You were dangerous! Your souls, born undersized, were dwarfed by Life to the commission point of crime. For our protection, therefore, we have placed you under lock and key. There you shall work—seeing, hearing, feeling nothing, without responsibility, without initiative, bereft of human contact with your kind. We shall see that you are clean, and have a bare sufficiency to eat, we shall inspect and weigh your bodies, and clothe them with a bare sufficiency of clothes by day and night; divine service you shall have; your work shall be apportioned to your strength. Corporal punishment we shall very seldom use. Lest you should give us trouble, and contaminate each other, you shall be silent, and, as far as possible, alone. You sinned against Society; your minds were bad; it were better if in our process you should lose those minds! For some reason which we cannot tell, you had but little social instinct at the start; that little social instinct soon decayed. Therefore, through bitter brooding and eternal silence, through horror of your lonely cells, and certainty that you are lost—no good, no mortal good to man or thing—you shall emerge cleansed of all social instinct. We are humane and scientific, we have outgrown the barbarous theories of old-fashioned law. We act for our protection and for your good. We believe in reformation. We are no torturers. Through loneliness and silence we will destroy your minds that we may form fresh minds within the bodies of which we take such care. In silence and in solitude is no real suffering—so we believe, for we ourselves have never passed one single silent day, one single day alone!”
This, by the expression of their eyes, is what the men in yellow seem to hear, and this, by the expression of their eyes, is what they seem to answer:
“Guv’nor! You tell me I did wrong to get in here, brought up like what I was—born in the purple—Brick Street, ’Ammersmith. My father was never up against the police; epileptic fits is what he went in for—I oughtn’t to have had him for a father; I oughtn’t to have had a mother that liked her drop o’ trouble, leavin’ me what you might call violent from a child. That’s where the little difficulty was, you see. The bloke that came about my girl knows that, seein’ he laid two years upon his back after I’d done with ’im. That set ’em on reformin’ me. To do the business proper, guv’nor, they gave me six months solitary to start on. All them six months I asks meself: ‘If I were out again, an’ he came hangin’ round my girl—what would I do?’ And I answers: ‘Hit ’im like I done!’ You tell me I oughtn’t to been thinkin’ that; guv’nor, I ’adn’t nothin’ else to think on. Only that, an’ what was goin’ on outside, with me there buried-up alive. You tell me that ther’ solitude ought to ha’ done a lot for me, an’ so it did. I ain’t never been the same man since. Well, when I came out I made a big mistake, I find, to have that sentence up against me, in the earnin’ of me livin’ honest, like as though I’d never been in prison. I oughtn’t to ’ave been a carpenter, I guess, or anythin’ where people ’as to trust yer, not likin’ them about their houses ’as has been in quod; I ought to ha’ had a trade that didn’t need no dealings with my fellow-creatures. You tell me what I wanted was to love me neighbour? But guv’nor, after I come out, I go regular wasted on that job. When you get wasted, guv’nor, you take to drink; your stomach feels a funny shiverin’; what it wants is warmth, a bit of fire—so, when you gets a sixpence, you lays it out in warmth. That’s wrong, you say. But, lucky guv’nor, drink puts heart into a man as has to get his livin’ out of lovin’ of his neighbour.... Soon after that I got another little lot, with six months’ solitude again, to put me straight. When you eat your heart out for want o’ somethin’ else to do, when your mind rots for the need of ever such a little bit to chew on, when you feel all day and every day like a poor dumb varmint of a caged-up rat—like as not you hit a warder, guv’nor. When you hit a warder, it’s the cat. This time I ought to ha’ come out p’raps a different man—an’ so I did. I ought to ha’ had a different mind, bein’ chastened and taught the love o’ God; but, seein’, guv’nor, that when I come to think it over, which was all day and every day, I couldn’t really find out what I had done which in my case any other man would ha’ stopped short o’ doin’—bein’, not any other man, but me—I come out that time meanin’ to go upon my own. And on my own I went, and ever since I’ve been—an out-an’-outer, as you can see with lookin’ at me now. An’ if you ask me what I think of all o’ you outside, I can’t reply, seein’ I’m not allowed to speak.”
This is the answer that they seem to make, their lips move, but no sound comes.
The warder watches these moving lips, his eyes, the eyes of a keeper of wild beasts, are saying: “Pass on, sir, please, and don’t excite the convicts—you have seen all there is to see!”
And so the visitor goes out into the prison yard.
On to the grey old buildings a new grey block is being built; it runs up high already towards the square of sky; and on the pale scaffolding are prisoners cementing in the stones. A hundred feet up, they move with silent zest, helping to make the little whitewashed spaces safe, to hold—themselves; helping to make thick the walls, that they may hear nothing, and their own moaning may be smothered; helping to join stone to stone, and fill the cracks between, that no creature, however small, may come to share their solitude; helping to make the window-spaces high above their reach, that from them they shall look at—nothing; helping to hide themselves away out of the minds of all who have not sinned against man’s justice; for, to forget them in their silence and their solitude is good for man, and to remember them, unpleasant. The sky is grey above them, they are grey against the sky; no sound comes down but the smothered tapping of their tools.
The visitor goes out towards the prison gate; and, meeting him, come three convicts marching in—the tallest in the centre, an old man with active step and grey bristles on his weather-darkened face. Light darts into his eyes fixed on the visitor; he bares his yellow teeth and smiles. His lips move, and out of them come words. So, when skies have been dark all day, the sun gleams through, to prove the beauty of the Earthly Scheme. These words—the precious evidence of purifying solitude, the only words that have been spoken in the House of Silence, come faintly on the prison air: “Ye —— ——!”