The Way of the Strong
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It was late in the afternoon when Frank Burton found himself at the outer wicket of the prison. He was clad now in his own clothes; the clothes he had worn on the night of his arrest. His prairie hat was crushed unusually low upon his close-cropped head. As he approached he called out his number for the last time.
"Forty-nine!"
The guard was ready for him.
"Going to Toronto?" he said, pushing a paper and pen toward him. "Twenty-eight dollars and seventy cents. Prison allowance four dollars fifty. Your letter. Sign!"
The money was handed to him in separate amounts, and the letter was placed beside them. Frank signed in a trembling hand, and took his possessions. Then he moved toward the wicket.
"So long!" cried the chief guard. Then he added facetiously. "Maybe I'll see you again some day."
Frank made no answer. He was beyond words. He passed through the wicket, which the guard opened for him, and stood outside in the summer evening light – a free man.
But he experienced no feeling of elation. A sort of apathy had got hold of him. His liberty now seemed almost a matter of indifference, and it was merely a mechanical movement that took him away from the frowning gray stone ramparts which had held him for a long twelve months. He had no thought of whither his steps were taking him. That, too, seemed to be a matter of no importance.
He moved on and on, quite slowly. His letter was still unopened in his pocket, whence it had been thrust along with his money. The trail wound its way down the hill upon which the prison stood. It led on, nearly two miles away, to the village of Alston. But it might have been Chicago for all Frank cared.
He was thinking of the past year, and all the events which led up to his incarceration, with the bitterness of spirit which only such unutterable degradation could inspire. Nor, curiously enough, were his feelings directed against the author, or the methods by which his downfall had been brought about. All that had long since exhausted itself during the interminable hours of wakefulness spent in his stuffy cell. His feelings against the man had worn themselves out, that is, they had settled down to a cold, unemotional hatred. No, it was the thought of life itself which haunted him like an evil shadow, from which he would gladly have escaped.
For him life seemed to be ended. Whichever way he looked it was the same. Nothing could help him, nothing could save him from the hideous stigma under which he lay. He was a convict, an ex-convict, and to the hour of his death so he would remain. Wherever he went the pointing finger would follow him. There was no escape. The brutalizing influence under which he had existed for twelve months had got into his very bones.
He told himself that he belonged to the underworld, to the same world to which some of those wretched beings belonged who had only escaped death at the hands of the law on some slight quibble, and with whom he had so recently herded. The daylight could never again be for him. He belonged to the darkened streets where recognition was less easy, where crime stalked abroad, and flitting shadows of pursuer and pursued hovered the night long.
He sank wearily at the roadside. His weariness was of spirit. His body was as hard as nails from the tremendous physical labors of the past year. A morbid craving to review his wrongs was upon him, that and an invincible desire to wait for the gathering of the evening shadows.
The westering sun was shining full upon him. A great waste of open land stretched away toward a purple line of low hills, fringed with a darker shadow of woods. Not a living soul was about, no one but himself seemed to be upon that trail – and he was glad.
For long hours he sat brooding, and, with each passing minute, his morbid fancies grew. He felt that from the beginning he had been doomed to disaster, and he only wondered that he had not realized it before. Was he not a bastard? Was he not a nobody? His father? He never had a father, only the wretched creature whose selfish passions had brought him into the world.
He saw it all in its true colors now. He could more fully understand it. That was the brand under which he was born, and it was a brand which was part of the criminal side of life.
His thoughts drifted on to Phyllis. She had not understood when he told her. How could she? She was clean, she was wholesome, she was born in wedlock. She – but he turned impatiently from the drift of his thoughts. He could never go back to her. She, like his mother, was a part of that life which was over and done with. He belonged to another world now. The underworld.
The underworld. But why – why should he live on, part of a world he hated and loathed? Why should he permit the cruel injustice of such a fate? There was a way to defeat this ruthless enemy. Why not adopt it? Why live? He had no desire to do so. He had the means at his disposal. He had money with which to procure a gun. Why go to Toronto at all? Why show his shaven head to the world, an object for that hateful, pointing finger?
For a while the idea pleased him. It was such a simple remedy for all his sufferings. He had passed out of Phyllis's life, so why risk the finger of scorn being pointed at her through the fact of his existence. And his mother. His gentle mother. He caught his breath. The finger of scorn would never be a burden to her. She was not like others. Her memory still retained the faintest sheen of light amid his darkness. He knew, even in those dark moments, that his self-inflicted death would utterly destroy her life. No. He was condemned to this under —
He remembered his unopened letter, and drew it from his pocket. He had not looked at it before. It had never occurred to him that he had any connection still with a world beyond the gray stone prison walls.
Now he looked at the envelope, and felt the hot blood of shame sweep up to his tired brain as he saw that it bore his mother's handwriting. He opened it reluctantly enough.
Folded carefully inside a number of sheets of closely written paper was a large sum of money. He took it out and examined it. There were five thousand dollars. Most of it was in bills of large denomination, but on the top, with careful forethought, there were half a dozen which ran from ten dollars down to one dollar bills. He understood, and the careful attention only left him the more pained.
With these was a smaller envelope. It was addressed in Phyllis's well-known hand. This, with the money, he bestowed in an inner pocket and proceeded to read his mother's letter first.
But the pathos of it, the breaking heart, which was sufficiently apparent in every line of that long story she had to tell, passed him utterly by, and left him unmoved. Just now he had no sympathy for anything or anybody in the world but himself, and it would have needed the heart of a Puritan to have blamed him. Yet his reading was not without interest in spite of the hardness of his mood.
It was a long, long story that Monica had to tell him, and it was full of that detail, rambling detail, inspired by the knowledge that she no longer had anything to conceal, the knowledge that the truth could be indulged in, in a manner that had been so long denied her. From the very outset she told him the real facts of his birth, and it was with something approaching regret that he learned that she, Monica, was not his mother. Somehow the shame of his birth, as it had reflected upon her, was forgotten. Somehow the stigma seemed to belong to him solely.
In her story she carried him through the old, old days of their life together, reminding him of trials and struggles never before fully explained. Tribulations which pointed for him her devotion and loyalty to the dead and the living.
Then she passed on to the manner in which he had been trapped by her husband. Here were displayed her passion-torn feelings, which left the man cold. She gave all the details in uncolored nakedness, and while condemning utterly, the cruelty and injustice of her husband, she yet pointed his motives and pleaded for him.
Then she passed on to the manner of her own discovery of his whereabouts in prison, her own discovery of her husband's ruthless handiwork. And again came that note of pleading for the man she loved. She told him how Hendrie, directly he discovered his hideous mistake, moved heaven and earth, and scattered money broadcast, to obtain his release; and how, at last, he had succeeded.
Finally she appealed to him with all the ardor of a mother's love to come back to her at once. To come back and receive all the reparation which she and her husband were yearning to make.
At the end of the reading Frank refolded the letter and returned it to his pocket. In spite of the identity of its author, in spite of his own natural kindliness of heart, there was not one sign of softening in his now hardened blue eyes.
It was different, however, with his second letter. Phyllis had no story to tell, she had no forgiveness to plead for any one. She merely had the fullness of her own simple, loving heart to pour out at his feet. Not once through four pages of closely written paper did she hint at his hardships, his dreadful wrongs. She loved him, she wanted him, as she believed he loved and wanted her; and so she just told him, as only Phyllis, with her wide understanding and simplicity of heart could have told him.
As he returned this letter to his pocket there was a marked difference in his manner. There was a lingering tenderness in his actions, and a dewy moisture about his hollow eyes.
The sun had set, and a golden twilight was softening the world to a gentle, almost velvet tone as he rose from the edge of the grass-lined trail. He stood erect. That painful slouch he had acquired during the past year appeared to have left his shoulders. His head was lifted, and he began to walk down the trail at a gait full of decision and purpose. Phyllys's love had heartened him as it always heartened him. Something of his morbid shadows had receded before the brightly burning lamp of her love. He felt a better man, and a spirit of defiance had risen to combat the claims of that underworld which had threatened to swallow him up.
At Alston he made his way to a store where he could procure some letter paper and envelopes. Just for one moment he hesitated at the door of the building. He was about to meet a free citizen. One who had never known prison bars. With a thrust he drew his hat well down to his ears, squared his shoulders and went in. His precautions proved needless. The man who served him was used to such visitors, and quite indifferent. He scarcely even looked at him as he fulfilled his order, and took the prison money.
Frank hurried away. His self-consciousness was quite painful. But he meant to beat it.
His next effort was a restaurant. He was a long time making his selection. Nor did it occur to him to wonder at the number of cheap eating houses this small village supported. Finally, however, he accepted the doubtful hospitality of a Chinese establishment where they dispensed a cheap chop-suey. Again his appearance caused no surprise as he gave his order and then sat down at a corner table.
Here he drew out his letter paper and laid it on the much-stained table before him, and, in a moment, had forgotten the almond-eyed attendant who was preparing his food.
He felt it necessary to answer Monica's letter at once. His purpose was definite and quite clear in his mind. The past, his past, their past was done with. He would face the world alone, and on his own resources. The letter was quite short and was finished before the Chinaman brought him his food.
His meal finished and bill settled, he waited until the lynx-eyed Mongolian was engaged elsewhere. Then he placed the letter and the five thousand dollars into an envelope and addressed it to Monica at Winnipeg. It was his intention to mail the packet from Toronto.
CHAPTER IV
ON THE RAILROAD
No man may serve a term of imprisonment in a modern prison and return to freedom on the same moral plane as he left it. A man may fall, but he may rise again, provided he is saved from that lifelong branding which a penal prison leaves upon its victim. Innocent or guilty the modern prison system is an invention which must rob its victim for ever of his confidence, his self-respect, almost of his hope. It is an institution set up to protect the free citizen, and terrorize the wrong-doer into better ways. And it does neither of these things. Instead, it pours upon society, daily, a stream of hopeless, hardened, bitter creatures, who, through its merciless process, have abandoned what little grip they ever had upon their moral natures, and drives them along the broad, ill-lit road of crime. Instead of being the deterrent it is supposed to be, it is the worst creator of crime known to civilization.
These were some of the reflections forced upon young Frank Burton after twelve months' bitter experience in Alston Penitentiary. And now, with each passing moment of his new freedom, the truth of these painful observations was more and more surely brought home to him. An innocent man, he had come out into the light of freedom, dreading and shrinking before every eye that was turned in his direction. His self-confidence was shaken. All his old trust and belief in the goodness of the life about him seemed to have melted into dark and painful suspicion, and, for the time at least, he was forced into those darkened purlieus which belong to the world of crime. The light was unendurable.
He had changed terribly from the buoyant lad he had been. He had seen so much, thought so much during those twelve long months, that now he was weighted down by a maturity that belonged to twice his years.
He knew he could never go back to the old life. That he had long since made up his mind up to. More than that, he could not accept benefits from those who belonged to it, whom he had known and loved. Even Phyllis, for all her ardent affection, she, too, belonged to a life that was wholly dead.
The future, his future, lay in his own two empty hands. Those whom he loved, and those whom he hated and despised could have no part in it. Were it otherwise he felt that to see Monica would be to bring him into contact with Hendrie, and such contact could only stir in him all the evil influences of the prison, influences from which it was his determination to escape.
Phyllis? Little Phyllis?
No. She must go, too. The band of the criminal had sunk too deeply into his soul. She must be left free. No such contamination must be brought into her life. His love for her was far too great for him to submit her to such a dreadful disaster as marriage with an ex-convict.
He had thought of all these things before, he thought again of them now. They were rarely absent from his mind.
The moment he read Monica's letter he knew what he intended to do. And it was the same when he hungrily devoured the words of devotion he received from Phyllis. Dealing with Monica's letter had been simple enough. With Phyllis's it was a far different matter. He wanted her to understand. He knew he must hurt her, but he felt that by presenting all his feelings to her, she, with her wide understanding, would appreciate and accept his decisions.
The whole journey from Alston to Fieldcoats, in the old-fashioned rumbling "stage," was given up to these hopeless meditations of an outcast. And he was glad of it. He was glad that he had the time to think of the letter he must send this girl at once.
It was dark when the twinkling lights of Fieldcoats, the nearest town where he would take train for Toronto, came into view, and he was glad of that friendly obscurity. His shrinking from the light was no morbid feeling. With his close-cropped head the story of his recent past was open for every one to read.
He did not complete the journey to the final halting place of the stage, but dropped off it in the lower and more obscure part of the town. It was here that he meant to begin his new life. A cheap, clean bed was all he desired, just a place where he could rest between sheets, and write his long letter to Phyllis. He wanted something solid on four legs. Something which would not remind him of the hammock he had learned to hate.
He found the place he required without difficulty. It vaunted the title, "The Alexandra Hotel," and its beds, in cubicles, were let out at twenty-five cents and ten cents a night. It was a mere "dossing house," but that was quite a matter of indifference. He felt he had no right to squeamishness.
He booked one of the higher priced cubicles and ascertained that it was clean. Then, with a sigh of resignation, and some squaring of the shoulders, he prepared to face the curious eyes of the derelicts who haunted the "office" of the establishment.
To face even these, with his close-cropped head, Frank found no light task, but he knew that for weeks yet he must keep himself hardened to the consciousness of his prison brand. The only thing possible was a desperately bold front, a front that would intimidate the curious, and, if necessary, he must follow it up with all it threatened.
So he entered the room and calmly looked about him. He was big, spare, and enormously powerful. His hard blue eyes deliberately sought for any eye that might be turned in his direction. His trouble was wasted. He forgot that these poor creatures, lounging upon the hard Windsor chairs, reading papers, or staring hopelessly before them while they smoked, were derelicts like himself. Nobody gave him the slightest heed, and he was left to seek out his obscure corner where he could write in peace.
Once assured of his immunity, Frank began his letter, and promptly became completely lost to his surroundings. The long-pent thoughts of the past year flowed passionately as he attempted to show the girl he loved all that which lay deep down in his simple heart.
It was not, perhaps, the convincing letter of a deep thinker. It was not a letter full of the refinement of logical argument. He wrote just as he thought, and felt, and saw, with a mind tinged by the dark hues of his own sufferings and the sufferings of others.
He told her, simple creature that he was, of all his love for her. He told her of the aching heart which this definite parting left him with, and, in the same breath almost, he told her that he regarded it as his sacred duty to shield her from contamination with a disgrace such as his. He forgot that where a real woman's love is concerned, duty, and perhaps any other scruple is willingly flung aside.
His simplicity carried him into deeper water, for he wrote long and ardently of his own future, a future conceived, and to be founded upon all he had seen and experienced in prison. Again he forgot the wide mind of the girl he was writing to, and blindly believed that the sincerity and honesty of his motives must appeal to her.
It was altogether a headlong sort of letter. He wrote as he thought and felt, and scarcely paused for a word or phrase. The gist of it was a yearning for a sort of sublime socialism. He could not longer bear the thought of self-seeking. He had seen so much of the disastrous results of it that he felt and knew that the whole process of it was utterly wrong. The prisons were filled with its results.
Those things, he said, had started his train of thought, and, with each passing day, his eyes had become more fully opened.
All the old ambitions, he told her, had been rooted out of him for ever. They were the natural impulses of a heart and mind all untutored, and far too immature for the real understanding of life. He had desired wealth and place in the world, and it had seemed good to him to so desire. Nor was it to be wondered at. Such desires had been inspired by honest motives, if, perhaps, selfish. They were just the first teachings of life until – it presented the reverse side of the picture.
He had been shown the reverse of the picture, and it had come in time. For twelve months he had gazed upon it and learned its lessons. For twelve months he had groped amid the cobwebs of life and sought among the darkened corners. That which he had discovered there had plainly shown him that, for him, past and future ambitions were divided by a gulf that could never be bridged again. In future his life would be cast on the side of the helpless and struggling, on the side of the oppressed, and those who were less endowed for the battle of life.
The battle of life? There should be no battle. There never was a battle intended. Why should there be? Was there not more than enough to go round? It was only because the laws of man permitted accumulations to the individual and so reduced more than half the world to a position bordering on starvation, a condition which lay at the very root of all crime. The old belief in the survival of the fittest was a dead one. It applied to simple physical conditions, not to the right to enjoy a fair share of those blessings a beneficent Creator had provided for the benefit of all. Think of it, he appealed, think of the king of beasts cornering all the food upon which his species depended to support life. Picture one proud brute standing over a hoard of rotting flesh, flourishing his tail and snarling defiance at a crowd of starving creatures of his own kind. Would they permit it? Would they leave him in possession? No, they would set upon him in their numbers, and, in desperation, they would tear him limb from limb.
Brotherhood and Equality! That was to be the keynote of his future. Henceforth all his power, all his heart should be flung into the only cause that could make the world endurable.
So he wrote to this girl of more than common wisdom, and he told himself she would understand. He told himself that though their lives could never come together again, at least he would possess her sympathy.
It was long past midnight when Frank's letter was folded in its cheap envelope and addressed. But its writing had done him good. It had been inspired by a big heart, if little wisdom, and he felt that he had taken his first step upon the new road opening out before him.
There were still stragglers in the office when he finally retired to his cubicle. Some were sleepily drunk, after an evening spent in "cadging" drinks among the low-class saloons in the neighborhood. Some were merely utterly weary with a long day of vain searching for some means of livelihood. All were unkempt and tattered, and most of them dirty.
These were some of the poor creatures belonging to the ranks of those, who, in his lofty ideals of the work that lay before him, Frank hoped to range himself on the side of. In his youthful blindness he failed utterly to recognize the workings of the definite laws of compensation. He missed entirely the most glaring fact of life. It passed him by that the majority of these were able-bodied men who had wilfully thrown away the chances which life never fails to offer, for the indulgence of those selfish passions which in his heart he abhorred.
That night he slept the fitful sleep of a man unused to his surroundings, but he was sufficiently refreshed when the hour appointed for arising in such places arrived. He turned out quite ready to face all that the day might bring forth. He knew that he must endure many trials of patience and feelings. But he intended to face them with a brave heart.
Ten cents was all he allowed himself for his breakfast. He required only sufficient to sustain life, nor did he obtain more for the money. Then he made his way to the railroad depot, forcing himself to a blindness for the attention his appearance attracted. Here he made inquiries as to the train, and booked his passage. The train for Toronto left just before noon, so he purchased a newspaper and sat down in the waiting-hall. He intended to pass the time scanning the advertisements, that he might learn the best means of obtaining employment when he arrived at his destination.
The train was "on time," and, in due course, Frank boarded it. The car he selected was fairly empty. At the far end of it a party of people, evidently a family party, occupied several seats. For the rest five or six men and two women were scattered about its length.
He took his place in the rear seat of the coach, feeling that it was preferable to have no inquisitive eyes behind him. Those who displayed marked attention from in front he felt confident of being able to deal with. But he reckoned without his host.