Part 3
I tried to discover what had worked in his mind at this time, and he could only tell me that he wanted to be daring, wanted to feel himself big. The meek children of that neighbourhood went to Sunday-school; he regarded them with contempt; a certain section were neither good nor bad, neither respectable nor disreputable, they did not interest him, did not satisfy him; others, the very elect, brave, bold, dauntless, and tremendously masculine, roused in his mind the greatest force in childhood admiration. He wanted to be like these fine fellows. He not only wanted to feel that he was clever at stealing, but also that he feared nothing, neither policeman, judge, prison, nor hangman's rope like these bloods of the slum. It is necessary to know something of a boy's life in the slums its conditions, its dullness, its surrounding influences, and its limitations to understand the swift growth and vigorous development of criminality in the minds of quite young children.
Boys of a strong animal temperament whose innocence has long departed, and who inhabit often enough the same bedroom as their fathers and mothers find themselves in streets full of shops and barrows where there is a profusion of everything the body can desire, even a profusion of things coveted by low and sensual minds such as
the barrow of vicious photographs, the empty shop employed as a penny-gaff for exhibiting the nude, and those miserable penny-in-theslot machines whose pictures are so vile and so vulgar. To enjoy these things money is necessary, and the only romantic way of getting money is by stealing; the only way of getting food and tobacco and pictures without money is by stealing them.
The homes from which these boys come into the streets, where so much wealth is displayed, are bad enough as sleeping-places, but as living-rooms they are quite horrible. To a high-spirited boy conscious of desire for a full-blooded life of adventure they are impossible. He must have movement, the excitement of danger, the enjoyment of forbidden pleasures.
'Have you ever realized,' Mr. Thomas Holmes once asked me, 'what it is to live below the poverty line? Not in the family of the well-to-do mechanic, with his club and his union; but right down down in the kennels and cellars and gutters? Think what your manhood would have been if your childhood had passed in a garret, where your mother made matchboxes for fourteen hours a day, and at the end of the week earned nine shillings. In that room you would have eaten your meals save the mark! toiled over the paste-pot before you went to school and after you came from school, and then you would have crawled into a corner to sleep on a mattress with the rest of the family That dingy world would have been your world, your environment.'
Then there is this most important factor to bear in mind; the vanity of the daring child, the swagger of the masculine boy which becomes so easily the well-known vanity of the criminal. Hear Mr. Havelock Ellis on this head:
The vanity of criminals is at once an intellectual and an emotional fact. It witnesses at once to their false estimate of life and of themselves, and to their egotistic delight in admiration. They share this character with a large proportion of artists and literary men, though, as Lombroso remarks, they decidedly excel them in this respect. The vanity of the artist and literary man marks the abnormal element, the
tendency in them to degeneration. It reveals in them the weak points of a mental organization, which at other points is highly developed. Vanity may exist in the well-developed ordinary man, but it is unobtrusive; in its extreme forms it marks the abnormal man, the man of unbalanced mental organization, artist or criminal.
George Borrow, who was so keen a student of men, has some remarks on the vanity of criminals in regard to dress: "There is not a set of people in the world more vain than robbers in general, more fond of cutting a figure whenever they have an opportunity, and of attracting the eyes of their fellow-creatures by the gallantry of their appearance. The famous Shepherd of olden times delighted in sporting a suit of Genoese velvet, and when he appeared in public generally wore a silver-halted sword at his side; whilst Vaux and Hayward, heroes of a later day, were the best-dressed men on the pavements of London. Many of the Italian bandits go splendidly decorated, and the very gipsy robber has a feeling for the charms of dress; the cap alone of the Haram Pasha, the leader of the cannibal gipsy band which infested Hungary towards the conclusion of the century, was adorned with gold and jewels of the value of four thousand guilders. Observe, ye vain and frivolous, how vanity and crime harmonize. The Spanish robbers are as fond of this species of display as their brethren of other lands, and, whether in prison or out of it, are never so happy as when, decked out in a profusion of white linen, they can loll in the sun, or walk jauntily up and down." He then describes the principal features of Spanish robber foppery. More significant and even more widely spread is the moral vanity of criminals. " In ordinary society," said Vidocq, " infamy is dreaded; among a body of prisoners the only shame is not to be infamous; to be an escarpe (assassin) is the highest praise." This is universally true among every group of murderers or of thieves, the author of a large criminal transaction is regarded by all his fellows as a hero, and he looks down upon the others with contempt; the man who has had the misfortune to be imprisoned for a small or, in the opinion of criminal society, disreputable offence, represents himself as the author of some crime of magnitude.
A Russian youth of nineteen killed an entire family. When he heard that all St. Petersburg was talking of him, he said, "Now my schoolfellows will see how unfair it was of them to say that I should never be heard of."
The Abbé Moreau, describing the arrival of a great criminal at the prison of La Grande Roquette, says that he is immediately surrounded, though the curiosity remains respectful, and is a king in the midst of his subjects; envious looks are cast at those privileged individuals who have succeeded in placing themselves near him; they listen eagerly for his slightest word; they do not speak their admiration for fear of interrupting him, and he knows that he dominates and fascinates them.'
Essential to a true understanding of the young criminal is the full apprehension of that immense respect with which great crime inspires the daring members of society whose blood clamours for adventure, whose bodies are insufficiently nourished, and whose minds are insufficiently subjected to discipline.
When Joe came back to his mates from that first birching he was very little wickeder than the average schoolboy; but mark the swift growth of the criminal.
His vanity to appear a fine fellow in the eyes of his rough mates led him not only to make light of his disgrace and its sufferings, but to propose things a great deal more daring and dangerous. He wanted to be a burglar before he was ten years of age.
Before he committed burglary, in the technical sense of that term, he shone as a hero among his fellows in other forms of crime requiring swiftness of execution and no little daring. It was one of his favourite tricks to enter a shop which he had reconnoitred with the cunning of a Red Indian, and to vault the counter, fill both hands from the till, and make his escape before the shopkeeper had risen from his chair in the back parlour. Another of his ways of getting money was to obtain goods at various shops in his mother's name, and to sell them at half-
price to other people. He made a habit of playing highwayman to boys sent on errands by their mothers, forcing those poor frightened children to deliver up either their money or their packages.
To return tamely home after some of these escapades not only was dangerous but dreadfully uninteresting. He became one of a gang who slept out slept either in common lodging-houses or in the open streets. He was not in the least ashamed when a policeman laid him by the heels and he went to prison.
It was at the age of fourteen that he committed his first technical burglary.
There was a jeweller's shop in the neighbourhood which exhibited a tempting show of silver-plate in its windows. This shop occupied a corner, and a garden wall alone separated Joe from its back premises. To climb that wall at night, to enter the house, and to get away with some of the silver-plate, seemed to him a perfectly easy and quite a delightful adventure. He worked it all out with some of his mates, and dreamed great dreams of glory till the night came round for the crime.
Everything favoured these wild boys a dark night, empty streets, an absence of police. Joe climbed the wall, disappeared on the other side, and his mates waited in the street to receive the plunder when he returned. As though born to the job of housebreaking, Joe found it easy to force a window, to raise the sash without making a noise, to enter the premises, and find his way in the dark to the shop and the silver. He made his haul listened to hear if anyone was stirring and then stole out through the window, crossed the garden, and climbed the wall. All was perfectly still and silent. He saw figures in the darkness beneath him, descended into their midst, and found himself held by four policemen.
He was not then fourteen years of age, and the law sentenced him to fifteen months' imprisonment.
The birching was a light matter, but fifteen months of prison fare, prison solitude, and prison discipline, this was terrible to the boy. He did not feel any horror of himself, any fear of hell, any desire for goodness, but in his prison cell this London boy determined that he would give up his mates, mend his ways, and live a life in which the police could never interfere. He tells me he suffered terrible remorse, and used to cry in his cell; but when I question him it is to discover that he felt only the inconvenience of prison, the wretchedness of his fare, and the horrible, maddening deprivation of his liberty. A boy who has ever endured three hours' 'detention' on a half-holiday may guess what this strong-limbed, daring lad of fourteen suffered during those dragging fifteen months of prison.
But when he came out, there was nothing in his heart except bitterness and rage. Far from mending him, far from creating in him any desire for goodness, uprightness, and a life of useful work, prison had only made the lad a deadly hater of law, and a sworn enemy of society. He determined to plot against society and to beat it at its own game.
Within three months of his release he was arrested and sent to a truant school. This punishment also failed to reform his character. He came out from it to receive in quick succession nine sentences, each of a month, for thefts of various kinds.
He was now marked down as incorrigible, ticketed by the police as one of the criminal classes. People pointed at him in the streets, policemen gave him a look as he went by, sometimes followed him.
He now began to work as a real burglar, associating with notorious cracksmen. He heard in one of the public houses he frequented of a man, the owner of a laundry, who kept all his money in the breast pocket of his overcoat, which he always hung at night on the peg of his bedroom door. Sometimes, it was said, that pocket contained as much as fifteen or twenty pounds.
Joe studied the house, made himself acquainted with its plan, and one
night set out to pick the pocket of that overcoat hanging from the bedroom door. His account of this crime made one feel something of the terror associated with desperate burglars. He is a man above the medium height, of a thin and wasted frame, but with broad shoulders and a large greyish face; the forehead low, the head round, the eyes big, searching, menacing; the voice full of a quick decision and a certain hard brutality.
'I slipped out one night from a public-house,' he told me, 'walked into dark streets until I had dodged all the police that were watching me, and then made my way to the laundryman's house. There was a wall that a cat could climb easier than I could, but I nipped over it, and lay in the garden, listening to hear if I had disturbed anybody. Not a sound. I went to the back of the house, found a window that was all right, opened it with only a creak or two, waited on the sill for five or ten minutes to hear if anybody was stirring,, and then stepped quietly inside. Quietly! I went bang into a bath of water, stumbled, fell, and made such a clatter that I woke the people up. I heard the wife say, "There's someone downstairs!" And I heard the man say, " Go along with you; it's only a cat." The wife persisted. The husband told her to shut up. I stood where I was in the dark bath-house for a solid hour. Then I moved, groping my way. I found the hall, crept to the stairs, and listened. Nothing could be heard, except a clock ticking. I waited, and then went softly up the stairs. When I reached the landing I could hear the man and woman snoring like a couple of pigs 1 I remember I felt disgusted by the noise they made. Lor', I never heard anything like it upon my word, it was just like a couple of pigs. I stood listening to them at that bedroom door less than an inch of wood between me and the overcoat for another hour. Then I put my fingers round the handle, turned it very gently, and opened the door. The snoring sounded much louder. There was no light in the room. I hadn't disturbed them in the least. I waited for a few minutes, then slipped my free hand round the door, felt for the overcoat, found the bag of cash, drew it out, slipped it in my pocket, and shut the door as quietly as I had opened it, waited a few minutes to be certain I hadn't disturbed them, and then very slowly went down
the stairs. I gave the bath a wide berth, got out of the window, and made off.
'There was twenty-one pounds in the bag, and I went large. I bought myself a new suit of clothes, gave the money to a pal to keep for me, and kept just enough for drinks and cigars till the affair should blow over. But four days afterwards a policeman came to me. " Joe," he said, "where did you get that suit of clothes from?" "My cousin gave it to me," I answered. Not a bit of use. They had me, and I got a stretch.'
A few days after he came out he was standing one day looking into a jeweller's shop, when a policeman gripped his arm suddenly from behind and marched him off to the station. In his pocket were found some housebreaking tools. He was sent to prison.
All that he suffered in these imprisonments, so far as his inarticulate subconsciousness can express itself, appears to have been a remorse of the stomach. Every Sunday, half-starved, forsaken, and silent in his prison cell, he reflected on his brothers at the family dinner-table in his father's house. They were not only at liberty; they were enjoying a Sunday dinner. His imagination brought into his cell the rich odours of beef gravy, the flavour of baked potatoes, the taste of white bread, the pleasant smell of hot roast beef fresh and sputtering from the fire. He tells me that he was not maddened by this memory, but saddened to tears. He used to cry softly to himself, swallowing great lumps in his throat, and thinking of all that he missed by being in prison. There are many tears shed in gaols; these places indeed are houses of weeping, and tears for a Sunday dinner are not perhaps in the sight of the spirits vastly different from tears of a more religious contrition. When this man wept for roast beef and fried potatoes, he wept for his past life, just as Verlaine, with a greater gift of expression, wept in the cells of his French prison:
Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit, Si bleu, si calme! Un arbre, par-dessus le toit, fierce sa palme.
La cloche dans le ciel qu'on voit Doucemeat tinte. Un oiseau sur l'arbre qu'on voit Chante sa plainte.
Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est la, Simple et tranquille. Cette paisible rumeur-la Vient de la ville. Qu'as-tu fait, o toi que voila, Pleurant sans cesse, Dis, qu-as-tu fait, toi que voila, De ta jeunesse?
Weepingalmost without ceasing, and thinking of his brothers in their father's house, the London burglar, like the Parisian poet, was really weeping for his wasted youth. He got so far in his remorse as to pray, and so real was his bitterness even if inspired by a Sunday dinner that his prayers were always for death. He wanted to get out of a world which seemed to have no use for him, a world whose affairs appeared to be governed by policemen who had a 'down' on him. All through his imprisonment he had these fits of remorse, and prayed to die.
Never once and in this all the prisoners I have ever talked to bear him out never once did a prison chaplain visit his cell, make an appeal to his higher nature, or show that interest in his life, whether he swam or sank, which an expert like General Booth tells us is the very first step towards the reclamation of the outcast. I asked him his opinion of the Church services, and he said that they were regarded as opportunities for conversation, that the words of the prayers sounded like a mockery, that singing hymns was pleasant and popular, that the sermons were unintelligible. In the interviews which a prisoner is supposed to have with the chaplain before release, he was addressed always in the same words (others bear him out in this, too), 'Well, I suppose I shall see you back here in a month or two?' Once he turned round on the chaplain and said, 'Yes, and it won't be your fault if you see me back here all my life.' He was conscious that the chaplain ought
to have been able to help him. A strange conviction in the mind of such a man.
We have now to relate something concerning the police which we must preface with a caution to the reader. It is not intended here to argue that the treatment experienced by Joe, and some others, is in the least typical of the London police. Many of these men help old prisoners, and are kind to them in divers ways. But this is truth let a man inspire two or three of the police in his neighbourhood with hate, and that man may be marked down for ceaseless persecution and most cruel tyranny. Whenever men of the class of policemen get a 'down' on a man as for instance, rough-riding corporals in a cavalry regiment on some unfortunate recruit they sometimes use their power, and exert their authority to make that man's life a hell in their own phrase, to break him. I do not say in the case of the police that they have not some excuse for this conduct they are brave men exposed to most cowardly and brutal assaults but their vengeance is certainly a danger and a great expense to the State. I fear that this private execution of vengeance still goes on; I am sure that the criminal class is made worse by it; I am convinced that the heads of police are unaware of it; moreover, I feel that the police who do these things consider themselves justified in their action, and believe that in executing private vengeance they are furthering the cause of law and order quite as much as getting even with their oppressors. One is not by any means making a general attack upon the London police.
When Joe came out from prison he went, with the money he had earned by prison labour, and asked his father to come for a drink. The old man refused. Joe went to the tavern, bought himself a drink, purchased a little gin for his mother and a few cigars for his father, and returned home with these peace-offerings. Half an hour afterwards he was taking the air, and enjoying the sweets of liberty. A policeman crossed the road and stopped him. 'Joe,' he said, in a kindly voice, 'an old gentleman has had his watch pinched; the description given answers to you; the inspector thinks you can clear yourself all right, but wants you to step up to the station and give an account of your movements.'
'Why, I've only just come out!' said Joe.
'I know; but the description answers.'
Joe walked easily and cheerfully beside the policeman, laughing at those who turned and stared, thinking that Joe was caught again. As he entered the station the policeman suddenly gripped his arm, and ran him before the inspector. 'I charge this man,' he said, 'with drunkenness and begging.'
When he was in the cell two or three constables entered. Joe had not handled the police force gently in the past, and he had experienced before police retribution in the station cell. But now he was innocent.
The policemen set about him with their fists and feet and did not leave him until he was bleeding, bruised, and almost unconscious.
I asked him why he did not hit back, or insist upon seeing the inspector. His answer chimed exactly with the comment of another old gaol-bird who was present, 'What would have been the use?' They both smiled at my innocence in asking such a question. Then these two men told me of how on many occasions they had been the victims of police 'justice,' of how on many occasions the door of the station cell had opened, and two, three, and four men had entered to pound them unmercifully, many occasions. Those nights in the cell of the police station are dreaded by the marked man as much as any part of the prison treatment, except 'solitary.' The utter uselessness of complaint, the necessity of taking the punishment 'lying down,' the feeling of its injustice which stirs in their blood this makes them bitter against the police, and there is no bitterness in the world like an old convict's for the force of law and order. When Joe came out from imprisonment which followed upon this shameful arrest, he was a man with but one thought in his soul murder. As he 'came down the street' he encountered the policeman who had put him away. The man laughed, and said, 'I did you nicely, Joe, didn't I? Cheer up! I'll have you again before long.' 'Not without cause, you!' said Joe, and walked on.
He waited till dark, and then went to a street with iron railings in front of the areas. A blow with his knee broke a railing in the middle; a wrench with his strong hands at the spike, and he had drawn it out from the crossbar. This weapon he slipped inside his trousers, and went to meet the constable who had put him away.
The man came along; Joe hid in a doorway. The man drew level with Joe. Out came the iron bar, and with one smashing blow, as the constable passed, one blow which broke the helmet to pieces and cracked the man's skull like an egg-shell, Joe's enemy lay senseless on the pavement.
For this crime he received a long stretch at Dartmoor.
He told me that he has never suffered so much in his life as he suffered during solitary confinement. He said that no words can express the torture of that punishment. A flogging is bad, very bad, but it is not to be compared with the maddening horror of solitary confinement. A diet of bread and water wastes the body to the point of extremest weakness; and in this pitiable condition of physical collapse the mind has to endure solitude, silence, semi-darkness. One day of this punishment is hard to support, but two, three, four the hardest brute in the world is reduced to whining for mercy.
I asked him what a man does in solitary confinement, and never, so long as I live, shall I forget his answer. It was an answer given not in words, but in a posture. He sat forward on the edge of his chair, rested an elbow on his right knee, placed his fingers against his cheek, and stared at nothingness.
'It's like that all the time,' said another gaol-bird, who was present, studying Joe's attitude with a critical and approving glance; 'and sometimes it's like this.' He let his body lean forward, set both elbows on his knees, and with his hands on either side of his face, the fingers almost meeting over the head, stared down at the floor.
Joe said to me, 'All day long like that on bread and water. No light, no air, no sound of a voice, no sound of a step, nothing! I reckon a man would rather be hanged than go through solitary.'
This man, whose story will disclose a nature very far from indifferent to kindness and sympathy, whose brain is acute, observing, and reflective, and whose whole life is now given to saving the criminal classes, assures me that every fresh imprisonment only hardened him, and declares that no one who has really studied prisons, with a knowledge of prisoners, can believe that imprisonment has any other effect than this terrible, cruel, and costly effect of hardening and making worse. He speaks with authority. This man who is grey and looks so old is four-and-thirty. Out of his thirty-four years of life, seventeen have been spent in prison. This seems a suitable place to quote Thomas Holmes on our prison system: 'It is the most senseless, brutal, and wicked of all human schemes for checking crime. Appallingly stupid. When I think of men I know sitting in their dark cells at night they put them to bed at eight o'clock! I can almost cry with the pain of it. If the idea is simply to punish, the present system is admirable; it is so supremely devilish. But, I take it, the State, when it gets hold of a man who has broken one of its laws, desires to send him back to the world as speedily as possible, to work honestly and truly for the nation. Rut what does the prison do? It crucifies the man, and hardens him past redemption. It intensifies his bitterness against society, and adds a horrible darkness to the chaos of his moral nature. Do you know these words of a prisoner; they are worth remembering: "I know how many nails there are in the floor within reach of my eye, and the number of the seams also; I am familiar with the stained spots, the splintered furrows, the scratches, and the uneven surface of the planks. The floor is a wellknown map to me the map of monotony and I con its queer geography all day and at night in dreary dreams. I know the blotches on the whitened wall as well as I know the warts and moles on the hopeless faces opposite me. My mind is a mill that grinds nothing. Give me work work for heart and mind or my heart will lose its last spark of hope, and my brain its last remnant of reason."
'Think of those words for a night or two, as you move freely about the rooms of your home. And think of them when you wake to an open window and the freshness of a new morning. Think of them. And there are thousands of men penned in like this whose minds are a mill that grinds nothing every day in a Christian year. It is not sentimental rubbish; it isn't hysterical. Because, don't you see, a criminal is a human being, and in many instances of a most amazingly complex and bewildering fashion.'
Sir Oliver Lodge, who is interested in this question of prisons, and has made some study of it, asks, 'Are we satisfied with our treatment of criminals? Are we, as a civilized people, content to grow a perennial class of habitual criminals, and to keep them in check only by devices appropriate to savages: hunting them, flogging them, locking them up, and exterminating them?'
At Dartmoor, Joe found something which mitigated the horrors of his existence. In prison there is rather more thieving, I am told, than outside. Every convict is on the look out for 'pinching' something; it breaks the monotony merely to look out for the chance of stealing, just as a fisherman will cheerfully go all day without getting a bite. But seldom is the convict's look out unrewarded. He can steal in the kitchen, in the shops, in the cells. Also he can trade with warders, many of whom (the great majority, I am told,) either out of goodness of heart or to add to their wages, smuggle in food and plug tobacco for the convicts. All this, as I say, breaks the monotony of prison routine.
One day, as he was working in the corridors of the prison, Joe saw a handkerchief in one of the cells. He 'pinched' it. Some little time afterwards that handkerchief came in useful. He was digging with a gang of convicts on the bogs when he caught sight of two little mice, huddling away to escape detection. Swift as thought - I have never seen man move his hands quicker than Joe - he bagged the mice; wrapped them in his handkerchief, and stuffed the booty under the back of his shirt. He got back to his cell with his find undetected.
For sixteen months they delighted the life of this habitual criminal those two little mice. In the loneliness of his cell he tamed them, taught them tricks, made them fond of him. For their sakes he stole from the kitchen and saved crumbs from his own meals. Their sleeping-place was a bag hanging from the wall of his cell. In this bag they produced a family, soon necessitating greater thefts from the kitchen, and the entire family was removed from prison when Joe got his liberty and taken back to his father.
Some of the prisoners tame starlings, crows, and sparrows.
One other means Joe discovered to alleviate the dullness of his lot. He instituted a telephone service with the next cell. By the removal of one brick, easily replaced, prisoners can speak to each other in whispers. What they find to talk about can be imagined. It is the gossip of the prison the cruelty of one warder, the kindness of another, the funk of a third, the theft of this convict, the mutiny of that, and what each man means to do when he gets out.
Joe came out of his sentence more hardened than ever, but more or less out of love with the life that had got him there. He found someone waiting to meet him. It was the converted Puncher.
The Puncher had set himself upon the conversion of this man, the chief terror of the neighbourhood. When drink had brought him down to common lodging-houses, the Puncher had made acquaintance with the Criminal. Both men were big in their own way. The Puncher was a great fighter; the Criminal was a great burglar. The Puncher treated the Criminal as an equal. They drank together, plotted certain villainies together, and in a way consorted. But there was always something which kept them separate. Joe respected the Puncher as a fighting-man, but he thought nothing of him as a criminal. Joe, it must be remembered, had risen so high in his profession of burglar as to work with men like Milsom and Fowler, who thought no little of his cunning, and had the highest respect for his courage. A sentence of twelve months mercifully, for Joe, broke up this partnership just before the famous murder. Another of the men he worked with was
high in his profession Dick Coombs, now serving a life sentence for the murder of his mistress. And another was a notorious criminal with the romantic name of Brighton Slasher, who is now serving his third term of seven years, to say nothing of other terms.
Joe was a first-class burglar, and a man trusted and respected by the best brains in his profession. The Puncher did not, therefore, stoop when he associated with Joe in common lodging-houses, and Joe was not without reason when he held himself at a certain distance from this prize-fighter, fallen into mere drunkenness and stupid violence.
It was of Joe the Puncher thought most longingly after his own conversion. He knew how the wild spirits in that neighbourhood respected Joe. He knew that Joe was looked upon as the most dangerous man in the place. If only this king of the local terrors could be caught, could be made to fling off evil,, and stand up clean and straight for right living, what an effect it would produce, what a glory for religion!
So the Puncher waited for Joe, and the two men talked together, Joe hearing what the Puncher had to say, and leaving him with the promise to think it over.
What the Puncher said was merely to point out the discomforts of evil and the comforts of goodness. He asked Joe to compare prison life with freedom, the lodginghouse with home, crime with human affection. He could say, 'Look at me now, and remember what I was once.'
Joe could certainly see a great difference.
But Joe was in the net of crime. His companions came about him. It was quite impossible to escape from them. Soon he was living in the lodging-houses of this dreadful quarter of the town.
One pays five pence a night in the houses frequented by Joe. You get for this money a single bed in a room containing six; lights are turned
out at half-past twelve; and you must leave your, bed before nine o'clock in the morning. If you have the 'clods' for the next night's doss, you can stay in the kitchen all day. These kitchens can be seen through the street railings; the doors are kicked to pieces, the windows have gone, the interior is lighted chiefly by the fire. Here hangs a general frying-pan beside the fireplace, always dirty. You take your food, cook it, hang the frying-pan up, still dirty, and then eat either on a backless bench or at a filthy table, often surrounded by the lowest creatures in London. This is the general kitchen, and it is here that the police come when they want a particular criminal.
Joe discovered that this environment was too strong for him. He remembered what the Puncher had said to him; he saw the common sense of it, but it was not, he felt, possible for him. He could not get away from his mates.
The Puncher stuck to him. One evening he took Joe back with him to his home.
'I shall never forget that night,' says Joe, with profound feeling.
There was no vision, no conversion. I expected to hear that Puncher had got him to pray, and that the vision had come. No. What the poor hunted, harried, and desperate criminal will never forget is the brightness and happiness of the Puncher's home.
'And he took me there!' says Joe, opening his eyes; 'me, fresh from prison, and bad if ever a man was bad. I shall never forget that evening.'
But before the Puncher could proceed with his humanizing, Joe was back in prison.
This time he prayed to God nearly every night of his sentence, and this time it was not for death.
A new idea had come to the Criminal. He was persuaded that if he could get a good woman to marry him he would be able to live a straight life. With this fixed idea in his head, this desperate terror of the police knelt down in his prison-cell night after night, and prayed that God would give him a wife. Among all the strange behests that go into the infinite from the souls of kneeling mortals, this human cry of the burglar in prison must seem to some the very strangest for he was praying for his idea of a Saviour, the only Saviour who could help him, a good woman 'that not impossible She.'
When he came from his praying and his prison labour, he found the faithful Puncher waiting for him. This time the Puncher begged him to come straight to the Salvation Army hall, but the Criminal said no to that, and went on his way. If there was a God, He would answer that prayer of the prison cell, and send a woman to save him.
A night or two after there was a dispute in a public house. The two disputants adjourned to fight it out. One of them was Joe. He nearly killed his man, but he himself suffered frightfully his head was half split, his cheeks were cut, and his face was so smashed about that he was scarcely recognizable. He went from the fight to a chemist's shop and had his head bandaged, his wounds dressed. While this was being done, he felt the hopelessness of his case his own utter hopelessness, and the strength of the net of crime which held him like a bird. He went straight from the bandaging to the hall of the Salvation Army.
At first no one recognized him. He sat there, with his bruised and blackened eyes, his swollen lips, and his bandaged head, listening to what they had to say. Then one of the Salvationists came to him, recognized him, and said:
'Aren't you tired of your life?' 'I am.' 'Wouldn't you like to begin again?' 'I would.'
Then followed the usual invitation, and Joe got up and marched to the penitent form. He knelt down, and some of them knelt beside him. They counselled him. They prayed for his soul. He got up saying that he was saved.
What happened nobody knows. Joe himself is unable to explain. He knelt there and prayed; he rose feeling that he had sufficient strength to make a fight for a clean life. He says he felt himself quite free of the net of crime.
Subconscious mentation? The working of the mind fed by a suggestion from the Puncher? Yes, this is quite a likely theory; but why the man should go to his prayers straight from a fight, why his head singing with blows should hold the idea of prayer, and should be capable of receiving peace this is difficult to explain. More difficult, too, the explanation of his complete conversion, the instant and complete conversion of a criminal called habitual so that he rose up with no desire to steal, and, as the sequel has proved, with strength to withstand the temptation of his former associates, with courage to march in the very streets frequented by those men under the banner of a ridiculed salvation.
Even the Puncher could not believe that the Criminal was completely saved. He said to the adjutant, with anxiety, 'I'm not happy about Joe; I can't help thinking he ought to have another dip.' To begin with, Joe had never done a day's work in his life. It was difficult to see how he would accustom himself to daily toil for a small wage; and he showed no particular enthusiasm in his conversion.
But Joe was waiting for his prayer to be answered.
They got him employment in a laundry. He received no wages at first, only his food, but he worked well and never once gave occasion for anxiety. The whole neighbourhood marvelled to see this cracksman, this friend of Milsom and Fowler, at humble work.
One day he was painting a cart, and looking up from his job saw a girl looking at him. He felt that his prayer was answered. He felt convinced that this was the wife for whom he had prayed.
He managed to strike up an acquaintance, albeit diffident of himself and terribly conscious of his bad record. One day, when they were friends, and had discussed many things, including their ideas of a happy home, Joe said to her, 'Do you think you could marry a man like me?'
'I don't know,' she answered. 'Why?' 'Because when I was in prison,' he said, 'I asked God to give me a wife, and I can't help thinking you are the one.'
But before she could reply, all that he had been crowded on his mind, and he compared himself with this good, pure, sensible girl, and felt unworthy. He told her all this, and said that while he could not help asking her to be his wife, he did not expect that she would marry him. He frankly and finely said that he might drift back and be what he was. The girl said, 'I know the risk. But I tell you what. I'll marry you, providing you join the Army and become a regular soldier.'
Was that the moment of Joe's conversion?
It was at that moment he felt suddenly and supremely exalted; his poor troubled soul was flooded with light, like an answer to prayer, and he felt assured that he was under the mercy and protection of a God Who cared. 'How happy I was! and how happy I am!' he exclaimed.
It is interesting or surprising, as you like it, to see the part played by the Salvation Army in this man's love story. The girl wanted a security. in all London she knew no other than the Salvation Army. If he became a soldier, she would become his wife. The very poor, swept by an ocean of irresistible oppugnance, have a refuge. It is the Salvation Army.
This man one of our habitual criminals is now as much respected in the neighbourhood where he was once the chief terror, as any man living a good, honest, and unselfish life. His devotion to his wife is an adoration. And people laugh when they tell you about Joe's tenderness to children, and how he loves to nurse a baby.
It seems to me that at the back of this conversion is the force we call, rather slightingly, respectability. The man wanted to be respectable, wanted a home, wanted to be free of prisons and police, wanted to have a Sunday dinner and a clean conscience. Well, but what is all this except a desire to be better than he was, to be consciously right, superior, and happy, to reach the height of his character?
After all, respectability is only another name for desire for betterment. And it must be seen that his conversion did not stop at respectability. He is supremely happy after three years of married life; he works for his living; it is a job to make both ends meet; there is sometimes an anxiety about the future; but in the midst of this happiness, respectability, and harassing anxiety, the soul of the Criminal is directed, like that of the Puncher, to saving other souls. He is one of the Salvationists in that bad neighbourhood who works with all his main to convert the wicked, the evil, and the profitless, and quite simply, quite genuinely, without fee or reward, and with a fine manful earnestness he talks bravely to the worst of his former companions about the love of God.
A COPPER BASHER
WHEN he was fourteen years of age he deliberately left a comfortable home and gave himself to the London streets. From earliest childhood he had manifested what is said to be the unmistakable trait of a criminal resistance to educative influence. Now, in the full lustihood of boyhood, he went to the streets. He went deliberately. He liked them. He wanted them. There appeared to be no power which could train him for social life.
It is interesting that this thoroughly bad and criminal man has never been the slave of sensual appetites. He has never smoked, he never had the smallest desire for tobacco, has never even been anxious enough to make experiment of this habit. Again, he has never been a drinker. Public-houses have been useful to him in the way of business; he has made them rendezvous for the concocting of crimes; but he has never had the least craving for alcohol. As regards other sensual temptations, he appears always to have been equally immune.
One powerful passion possessed his being from childhood, and left no room for anything else; this was the passion for crime. And, not crime on the grand scale, not valorous burglary nor carefully projected forgery or murder, but mean, savage, beastly, cowardly, and odious crime. The reader is now making the acquaintance of a human monster who occupies a middle place between the felon and the hooligan; a man despised by the great criminal and feared by the rough a ruffian and a cur.
He sits before me, talking of his past crimes in a way that makes me shudder. I do not know any man who has at times so filled me with loathing and aversion. He is short of stature, with great breadth of high shoulders, the brief neck fat and spongy. His hair is blade and grows in a silly fringe over his forehead; his heavy face is the colour of dough; there is deadness to human feeling in the blue eyes; the cruel mouth, which is never closed, shows teeth which never meet, and has a tired expression, a little contemptuous and indifferent. He speaks in the manner of one whose tongue is too big for the mouth, thickly,
slowly, drawlingly. Sometimes he laughs, and the sound is thin, heartless, metallic. The impression he makes upon me is one of horror.
And yet the mind of the man compels interest. One feels that here is an aspect of the human soul full of extraordinary suggestion. He gives one fresh ideas concerning evil. He makes iniquity take new shapes before the mind. One contemplates him with curiosity and baffled wonderment.
His family is of Irish origin. The father and mother were respectable people occupying a more or less decent house, and following as well as they could the religion of their forefathers, a Roman Catholic priest occasionally visiting them in their home and encouraging them in ordinary respectability. The brothers and sisters responded to this training. They went obediently to school, they attended church, they said their prayers, they grew up with the idea of getting the best employment they could, and submitted, without question, to the routine of civilization, and the necessities of their situation in the social world.
Danny was the black sheep of this humble family. He was like a stone to his schoolmasters, imbibing nothing, and indifferent to chastisement. He played truant from church. He refused to say his prayers. He regarded the whole life of the home with contemptuous disfavour. Never once, he says, was he conscious of any desire to learn, to be good, to work and get on in the world. Always, from his earliest remembrance, he resented discipline and loathed effort. He regarded both with impatient contempt. Why should one be careful of behaviour? Why should one try to get on? The whole of his being supplied no answer to these questions.
At the age of fourteen the home-life became insufferable. Its monotony irked him. He hated it and despised it. Although in that home he was assured of a comfortable bed and a sufficiency of food, he preferred the hazard of the streets. He went out one day with his hands in his empty pockets, and he never returned.
He became a slinking animal of prey, a human stoat, with the streets of London for his hunting-ground. His great physical strength made him welcome to a gang of youths who had taken to the streets, most of them at any rate, on account of brutality and starvation at home. This gang lived by crime, and were seldom so hard put to it as to sleep in the open. Their headquarters was a common lodging-house. Danny, who knew them all, and had often joined them in their devilries, announced to them his intention of living free. They welcomed him gladly. He became their leader.
When this gang had made enough money by crime for food and lodging, they would turn, for diversion, to the local hooligans, and use them brutally. The Londoner who wanders into the poor quarters may often have noticed a gang of vagabond young men hurrying through the streets as though with some definite and pressing purpose in view. He may, perhaps, have thought them to be hooligans. In reality they were probably the dreaded enemies of hooligans, young criminals whose passion for savagery drives them every now and then to fight those for whom the police do not trouble to interfere. Apparently, a young criminal is often visited with this overmastering impulse to fight, and as soon as he has earned enough money for his needs and has eaten his fill, an hour's idleness at a street corner will end in one of these sudden sallyings out to fight the roughs.
Danny took part in endless battles of this kind, many and many a time half murdering his enemies. It was his sport his cricket and football and physical culture. The gang to which he belonged was powerful, savage, and desperate. Nobody dared to interfere with it. Let Danny and his mates swing suddenly round a street corner, and women drew back from the gate to the doorsteps, children were called from the gutters, and the hooligans ran for their lives. During the fight, men looked on from the doors and windows of the houses, never daring to interfere, even if their own sons were among the hooligans. And this was merely the recreation of Danny and his gang of thieves.
This savagery took another form when Danny advanced in strength and brutality. It was a favourite occupation of theirs to waylay a policeman at night, to club him from behind with a piece of iron, and while he lay unconscious and silent on the ground to kick him from head to heel. Danny became what is called a 'Copper Basher.'
Perhaps this cowardly scoundrelism was inspired by hatred of prison. Very soon after Danny had taken to the streets he was arrested for felony, and disappeared from society for three months. His crime, of which he will not speak, and which he proudly insists was a 'felony,' may possibly have been the theft of twopence or threepence from a child sent to fetch a loaf of bread from the baker's. Whatever it was, Danny went to prison for three months, and those three months made him infinitely more cruel, infinitely more savage, infinitely more dangerous than ever he had been before. Three years might have broken his heart, three months hardened it.
A few instances of the way in which he earned his living will suffice to give the reader an idea of his mind. As a boy he learned to let a mate snatch his cap from his head and fling it among the boxes displayed outside a grocer's or a fruiterer's shop; while the mate ran away in pretended fear of Danny, Danny, apologizing to the shopman, would recover his cap with an egg or an apple, or a pound of sausages inside it, and rush off to punish his accomplice. Later on he became an expert shop-lifter. For months, even for years, one may say that this man lived by stealing from shops. He was not content with snatching goods, but coveted the money in the till. This was one of his favourite dodges: He and a mate, having chosen their shop, and seen that it was empty, would enter swiftly from the street; while Danny vaulted the counter and filled his pockets from the till, the other lay full length in front of the door leading to the parlour; if by chance Danny was so long at the till as to give the shopman time to rise from his chair, on opening the door and rushing out upon the thief, the unfortunate tradesman would trip over the accomplice's body, and come a cropper. It can be imagined that blackguards of this type would soon discover the shops kept by poor old women with no man to protect them.
Another very profitable 'lay' was that of stealing from drunken men. It did not matter whether the drunkard was a poor man or a rich man, whether he was discovered by day or by nigh; Danny always went for him and left him bare. One story, illustrating the cold-bloodedness of these young criminals, will show the reader how calmly robberies of this order can be executed in the streets.
One night, ranging the better quarters of London in search of prey, Danny and a mate noticed a well-dressed man sitting on the doorstep of a house in one of the best London squares. They immediately made for him, and found him sound asleep. There were people in the neighbourhood, but not near them. They took the man's money, his pocket-book, his watch and chain, his studs and links, and handkerchief. During these operations he roused, and they mothered him with great tenderness, professing their willingness to see him safely home. Then, when the robbery was complete, they looked about them. No one was to be seen. The man was quiescent, dozing back into huddled sleep. Will it be believed that these two savages turned round, set about the man they had robbed, and half murdered him with their fists and boots out of sheer devilry? The man was an Irishman, and a wild one; he made an attempt to fight; and even when smashed and kicked and broken he collapsed on the ground, he still kept up a gurgling shout for help. The two blackguards walked quietly away, their hands in their pockets. At the corner of the square they encountered a policeman. 'Guv'nor,' said Danny, with a cheerful smile, 'there's a wild Irishman down there, mad drunk; it'll take two of you to hold him.'
Another story illustrates the depravity of this type of mind in another aspect. From all I can gather the popular notion is not altogether true that there is honour among thieves. Thieves prey upon each other, give each other up to the police, rob and steal from each other. Certainly the type of thief represented by Danny never experiences a single scruple. That is what makes this man's story so interesting. He was of brutes the most brutal, of savages the most savage, of liars and traitors the most lying and the most treacherous; and throughout it all he never once felt that he was doing anything base or mean
the more mean, indeed, the more it tickled his fancy. He did the most scurvy things imaginable without a moment's twinge of conscience, and laughed over them afterwards.
What does the reader think of minds capable of such a scheme as this? The story got about that a bad woman had 'pinched' a purse and was treating two of her friends in a public-house. Two thieves immediately set out to get the stolen purse. When they reached the public-house, one of them boldly asked for a share of the plunder. It was refused. He then told the other two women by signs that it meant five shillings each if they cleared out. They emptied their tumblers, and departed with loving farewells to the bemused friend who had 'treated' them. When they were outside, the thief filled himself a glass of water, grabbed the purse, passed it to his mate, and at the same time flung the water; full in the face of the woman as she rose to pursue. The water struck her in the mouth, and she stumbled back choking; the thief filled another tumbler and shot the water, with tremendous force, between her gasping lips, sending her down. While she lay on the floor, he poured more water down her mouth and over her face. Then he calmly called the landlord, 'Here's a woman in a fit,' he said; 'give us some more water.' The landlord hastily passed a heavy carafe, and the thief poured it over the woman till she was nearly suffocated.
'She'll be all right in a minute or two,' said the thief, and got up. The woman staggered to her feet, choking and purple, and made her way out of the house in a vain quest of the thief.
Danny laughs over that story to this day, and I do not think that even now, while he hates the act and could not do it again, he realizes the full measure of its cruelty and abomination.
But while he was following a life of crime, living with criminals in common lodging-houses, and never doing an hour's honest work, there came constant and increasingly long interruptions from the police. Again and again Danny was arrested, again and again the police got even with him in the cell at the station, and again and again he 'went up the street.' If he laughs at the memory of his crimes, he
laughs good-naturedly at the punchings and kickings which the police gave him in the cell. He says he never got so knocked about in his life. 'They'd punch me in the nose,' he says, smiling; 'and when I went down wallop, one of them would hold me up for his pal to have a smack at my mouth. And then they'd all set about me with their boots. Cruel!' he says, tossing his head and laughing good-temperedly. He calls these private punishments of the police 'having it done upon me.'
Of course, Danny was well known as a cowardly assaulter of police. One understands that retribution in the cell of the station. But it was not the way to make this savage enemy of society a useful and a virtuous citizen. Every time Danny 'came down the street' he was worse.
'I'll tell you what prison does for a man.' Danny leans forward, rests both forearms on the table, and regards me fixedly, with bitterness evident in his loose mouth. 'It hardens him. Ask any man who has done time. I don't care who it is, nor what his offence was, nor whether he was hard or green when he went in. It's bound to. It can't do no otherwise. It hardens a man.' He sits back, and continues in his drawling voice. 'Another thing it does is to learn a man more tricks than what he knew before he went in. Prisons see more thieving in one day than the rest of the world sees in a fortnight. It stands to reason. Lock up a lot of men, treat them like animals, half starve them, and never make any attempt to teach them, and what's the result? They do you all round. You'd never believe how much plug tobacco gets into prison. There's precious few warders who don't do a bit of private trading on their own account. And the cookshop tempts starving men, and sharpens their wits. Well, I learnt more clever dodges in prison than ever I learned outside, I know that.'
Certainly the moral instructions had no effect upon his conscience. Like others I have questioned, this man tells me that never once in all the long record of his prison experience did a chaplain enter his cell or speak to him in private. Never once did a single person, governor or chaplain, make any effort to awaken and stimulate the sleeping conscience of this criminal. As a representative of society the governor
received him, and locked him up; as a representative of religion the chaplain read prayers and preached a sermon to him on Sunday. The taxpayer in his home, confidently hoping that the poor wretches in prison are being reformed and regenerated, likes to think that posterity will escape the heavy charge of punishing the lawbreakers. And in his cell Danny plots more villainies and rehearses new crimes against the hour when he will go 'down the street.'
Once only did Danny ever have private words with a prison chaplain. After serving a. term he went before the chaplain, who had expressed no wish to see him, and asked for the suit of clothes provided by the Prisoners' Aid Society. The chaplain looked at him, shook his head, and replied, 'Not for you. You'll be back again in a week or two.' Like the Criminal whose story we have told, Danny's blood fired up. But he checked. 'That's giving a bloke a good heart to go down the road with!' he exclaimed, and laughed. If the representative of religion could have realized it, that laugh was his indictment.
Consider, in passing, how the story of this chaplain illustrates the truth of Professor James's remarks about second-hand religion.' Directly you put a man within a gaol, as the official representative of religion, as the official deputy obeying the divine injunction to visit those in prison, be sure that Christianity becomes there as much a matter of routine as the rest of the penal discipline. One has sympathy with the chaplain; to visit hardened, ignorant, and perhaps abusive criminals all the day long is a dreary work; but one has no sympathy with those of them at any rate who, being paid to do this saving work, stay at home saying that it is useless. I do not think that any reasonable man believes an official representative of religion capable of accomplishing the regeneration of criminals; while a great number will perhaps hold the view that missions to prisoners, conducted by missionaries who have themselves suffered and repented, might make religion even in a prison the true and vital thing which saves the soul.
Danny, as I have said, represents the lowest type of criminal. When one reflects upon the utter baseness of his mind it seems impossible that he should ever have turned from his wickedness and lived. Before
telling how that happened, I must narrate an incident of his prison career which will show how very base and vile was his character.
Have you ever thought that a prison warder may suffer from nerves? I remember some years ago going over the prison at Wormwood Scrubs and seeing a single warder, unarmed, in charge of a number of men in the carpenter's shop, all handling more or less formidable tools; it struck me, then, that a good story might be written of a convict whose eyes succeeded in breaking down a warder's nerves, so that he dared not be alone. Danny told me of an incident that shows my imagination had reason.
'There was a warder,' he said, 'who got the jumps, and tried to cure them by being extra strict. He was particularly funky of one man. Somehow or other, I was always a favourite with the warders, got soft jobs, and was treated lenient. Well, this bloke came to me one day and said, "Look here, if you'll say that so-and-so," naming the man he was afraid of, "set about me, it'll be worth something good to you." I said I wouldn't say nothing of the kind; but sure enough the prisoner was put away. When I was taken before the governor, and he said that I had behaved well in rescuing the warder from the prisoner, that the poor man might probably have been murdered but for me, and that in consideration of this act he would see that my sentence was shortened, I was so taken aback that I couldn't speak.'
One feels that Danny might have spoken if he had chosen; one does not believe that he ever lost power of speech or was ever astonished by anything. No; he was the type of man who would 'give anyone away.' But Danny is ashamed of certain things in his past; the farther he gets away from that past and the more settled he becomes in happiness and peace of soul, the more is he inclined to blur the blackest things in his memory. He tells you his first crime was a 'felony'; he prefers that you should form the impression of a terrible burglary, not pence-snatching from a poor child. He says he was taken aback so that he could not speak; he does not want you to think that he gave a man away. If he lies in this way, one can forgive him.
I am convinced, from what I have heard, that this man had in his soul all that is most dastardly, base, scurvy, and vile; I do not think there was any imaginable mean thing that he would not have done. And the more one realizes this utter and horrible baseness, the more wonderful appear the revolution of his character.
It came about that Danny was arrested and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment soon after the conversion of the Puncher. Of course, he had heard of that miraculous event, and, of course, he had laughed over It with some of the Puncher's old mates in the lodging-houses. But in prison, realizing the weary time of monotonous suffering ahead of him, the conversion of the Puncher stuck in his mind and haunted his thoughts. He knew that the Puncher was better off as a saved man than as a drunkard. He imagined the Puncher's home, his fare, his good meals, nice clothes, his liberty unshadowed by fear of police. Then he considered within himself how bad and low the Puncher had been, a 'hopeless' drunkard. It seemed to him a wonderful thing that a man so abandoned to drink, and such a man, should all of a sudden give it up. He was quite dazed and staggered by the thought. What a drunkard, what a frightful drunkard, the Puncher had been; and now he was clean and respectable! For days the prisoner fed his mind upon this thought in the solitude of his cell. Alone in that little cramped space of stone, locked in, and without sight of tree, sky, or moving creature, the hardened criminal reflected upon the 'fair marvel' of Puncher's conversion.
And one day revelation came to this base and savage mind. It came suddenly, without miracle, and it did not in the least stagger him. He started up with the thought in his mind, 'If God can save Puncher, He can save me!' The revelation was too clear and staring to stagger him. This thing, which had never before occurred to him, was obvious, plain as a pikestaff. And yet it was wonderful. 'If God can save Puncher, that awful and degraded sinner, He can save me; I who love myself and know, therefore, that I am not so bad as other people.' Why on earth had he not thought of this before?
In Victor Hugo's Quatre-Vingt-Treize there is this question and answer; Boisberthelot said to La Vieuville, Do you believe in God, chevalier?' La Vieuville replied, 'Yes. No. Sometimes.'
Sometimes all men believe. Danny's 'sometimes' had now arrived. Hitherto God had never occupied his mind. He had thought nothing about religion, one way or the other. 'God' was a term convenient to round off an oath with. 'Hell' meant something bad. As for 'heaven,' it was too soft even for an oath; he had never been interested in that place; it seemed to him something unmanly and young-ladylike; he certainly had no objection to going there after death, if hell was the only alternative; but he reckoned it as bad as a Sunday-school.
All these years Danny had lived in modern London, which spends millions of pounds a year on religion and morality, and his ideas of God were what we have said. Surrounded on all sides by churches, charitable agencies, rescue societies, and educational machinery; brought by prison discipline to a willy-nilly consideration of formal religion on many a crawling Sabbath day, this man had yet never formulated to himself any ideas of God, existence, immortality. His phrase concerning religion has a penetrating significance: 'I never gave it a thought.' He had thoughts, plenty of them, for crime, scoundrelism, and lowest rascality; but not one, not one for life, its meaning, its responsibility, its great issue.
And now the first idea of God which occurred to his mind was that of a Rescuer, some indefinable Power capable of turning his unhappiness into happiness. Without any question as to the ability of this Something to help and save, Danny surrendered himself. But in a manner characteristic of the man. If the phrase may pass, this wretched prisoner put God on His mettle. And there was an element of self-righteousness in his idea. 'If God can save Puncher, He can save me.'
To reach God, he understood, prayer was necessary. So he got upon his knees in the prison cell, and offered his first prayer. He was a young
man, and twelve whole years out of his short life had been passed in gaols; he had never had an opportunity of understanding religion; he had never given the idea of God a moment's thought. But he knew just enough of the matter to kneel. In what spirit he knelt one cannot exactly say; the important fact is that this depraved brute did kneel, and did pray.
He says that he prayed throughout his long sentence, and hoped that when he left prison fortune would smile upon him, that it would be 'all right.'
He came out and was met by the Puncher. An answer to prayer.
The Puncher talked to him in his quiet, sensible fashion. What a rotten life he was living! Life passing, middle age approaching, and twelve years of prison! Was the game worth the candle? Was he happy?
Now this reasoning is powerful enough, because so obvious and sensible, in the case of a drunkard; but Danny was a man without carnal appetites; he was a brain concentrated on crime. Could it convert the thought of this man, could it change the grey matter of his brain, habituated from infancy to cunning and rascality? Its one effect was to draw from Danny the admission that certainly he did not want to be 'copped' again.
Then the Puncher moved from morality to religion. He spoke of spiritual peace, the pleasant feeling of a life lived rightly, the power of God to wipe away sins and give a soul a new birth. He told Danny that there was no other way.