The Under Dog | Page 4

I looked at the terrible mutilation, I could but recall the hideous fascination that overcame Josiane, the heroine of Hugo's great novel, "The Man Who Laughs," when she first caught sight of Gwynplaine's mouth--slit from ear to ear by the Comprachicos. The outrage on the Warden was not so grotesque, but the effect was the same.
I moved along the corridor and stood before the beasts. One, an old man in a long white beard, leathery, sun-tanned face and hooked nose, clasped the bars with both hands, gazing at us intently. I recognized his kind the moment I looked at him. He was like my Jonathan Gordon, my old fisherman who lived up in the Franconia Notch. His coarse, homespun clothes, dyed brown with walnut-shells, slouch hat crowning his shock of gray hair, and hickory shirt open at the throat, only heightened the resemblance; especially the hat canted over one eye. Why he wore the hat in such a place I could not understand, unless to be ready for departure when his summons came.
There were eight other beasts besides this old man in the same cage, one a boy of twenty, who leaned against the iron wall with his hands in his pockets, his eyes following my every movement. I noticed a new blue patch on one of his knees, which his mother, doubtless, had sewn with her own hands, her big-rimmed spectacles on her nose, the tallow dip lighting the log cabin. I recognized the touch. And the boy. I used to go swimming with one just like him, forty years ago, in an old swimming-hole in the back pasture, and hunt for honey that the bumblebees had stored under the bank.
The old man with the beard and the canting hat looked into my eyes keenly, but he did not speak. He had nothing to say, perhaps. Something human had moved before him, that was all; something that could come and go at its pleasure and break the monotony of endless hours.
"How long have you been here?" I asked, lowering my voice and stepping closer to the bars.
Somehow I did not want the others to hear. It was almost as though I were talking to Jonathan--my dear Jonathan--and he behind bars!
"Eleven months and three days. Reckon I be the oldest"--and he looked about him as if for confirmation. "Yes, reckon I be."
"What for?"
"Sellin'."
The answer came without the slightest hesitation and without the slightest trace in his voice of anything that betokened either sorrow for his act or shame for the crime.
"Eleven months and three days of this!" I repeated to myself. Instinctively my mind went back to all I had done, seen, and enjoyed in these eleven months and three days. Certain individual incidents more delightful than others stood out clear and distinct: that day under the trees at Cookham, the Thames slipping past, the white-sailed clouds above my tent of leaves; a morning at Dort, when Peter and I watched the Dutch luggers anchor off the quay, and the big storm came up; a night beyond San Giorgio, when Luigi steered the gondola in mid-air over a sea of mirrored stars and beneath a million incandescent lamps.
I passed on to the next cage, Marny watching me but saying nothing. The scout was in this one, the "type" in Marny's sketch. There were three of them--tall, hickory-sapling sort of young fellows, with straight legs, flat stomachs, and thin necks, like that of a race-horse. One had the look of an eagle, with his beak-nose and deep-set, uncowed eyes. Another wore his yellow hair long on his neck, Custer-fashion. The third sat on the iron floor, his knees level with his chin, his head in his hand. He had a sweetheart, perhaps, who loved him, or an old mother who was wringing her hands at home. This one, I learned afterward, had come with the last batch and was not yet accustomed to his surroundings; the others had been awaiting trial for months. All of them wore homespun clothes--not the ready-made clothes sold at the stores, but those that some woman at home had cut, basted, and sewn.
Marny asked them what they were up for. Their answers differed slightly from that of the old man, but the crime and its penalty were the same.
"Makin'," they severally replied.
There was no lowering of the eyelids when they confessed; no hangdog look about the mouth. They would do it again when they got out, and they intended to, only they would shoot the quicker next time. The earth was theirs and the fulness thereof, that part of it which they owned. Their grandfathers before them had turned their corn into whiskey and no man had said nay, and so would they. Not the corn that they had stolen, but the corn that they had