VI
The five men were led away, over the "Bridge of Sighs", as it was
called, to the city jail, where they had their pedigrees taken
again, and their pictures and their finger-prints--which for the
first time impressed upon their minds the fact that they were
dangerous criminals. Their clothes were taken away, and shirts and
trousers given them, whose faded blue colour seemed to have been
impregnated with the misery of scores of previous wearers. They were
led through steel-barred doors, and along dark, steel-barred
passages to one of the "tanks". A "tank", you discovered, was one
floor of this four-storied packing box; on each side of it were a
row of a dozen barred cells, each with four bunks, so that the total
maximum population which might be crowded into the central space of
the "tank" was ninety-six; however, this only happened on Monday
mornings, when the "drunks" had all been brought in, and before the
courts had had time to sort them out.
After you had lain down on your bunk for a few minutes, or had
leaned against the wall of the "tank", you felt an annoying stinging
sensation somewhere on you. You began to rub and scratch; before
long you would be rubbing and scratching in a dozen different
places, and then you would observe your neighbour watching you with
a grin. "Seam-squirrels?" he would say; and he would bid you take
off your coat, and engage in the popular hunting game of the
institution. Jimmie remembered having heard a speaker refer to the
city jail as the "Leesville Louseranch"; he had thought that a good
joke at the time, but now it seemed otherwise to him.
It was splendid to stand up in court and to take your stand as a
martyr; but now Jimmie discovered, as many an unfortunate has
discovered before him, that being a martyr is not the sport it is
cracked up to be. There were no heroics now, no singing. If you even
so much as hummed, they took you out and shut you up in a dark hole
called the "cooler"! Nor could you read, for there was no light in
your cell, and perpetual twilight in the central gathering place of
the "tank". Apparently the only things the authorities of Leesville
wished you to do were to hunt "seam-squirrels", to smoke cigarettes,
to "shoot craps", and to make the acquaintance of a variety of
interesting young criminals, so that when you were ready to resume
your outside life you might decide whether you wanted to be a
hold-up man, a safe-cracker, a forger, or a second-story operator.
Jimmie Higgins, of course, brought a different psychology from that
of the average jail-inmate. Jimmie could do his kind of work just as
well in jail as anywhere else; and barring the torment of vermin,
the diet of bread and thin coffee and ill-smelling greasy soup, and
the worry about his helpless family outside, he really had a happy
time-making the acquaintance of tramps and pickpockets, and
explaining to them the revolutionary philosophy. A man who went in
to remedy social injustice all by himself could never get very far.
It was only when he realized himself as a member of a class, and
stood as a class and acted as a class, that he could accomplish a
permanent result. Some of the workers had discovered this, and had
set out to educate their fellows. They brought the wondrous message,
even to those in jail; holding out to them the vision of a world
made over in justice and kindness, the co-operative commonwealth of
labour, in which every man should get what he produced, and no man
could exploit his fellows.
