Part 9 (1/2)

”Outside what?” she persisted.

”Law. And he wouldn't particularly want to get back, except that it pays. But I'm not concerned with what he does when he gets back. I want to show how it seemed to him outside and how he got there. He's more picturesque than I am, or I'd take myself.”

Blessed Anne, who had no grasp, she thought, of abstract values, but knew how to make a man able for his work, met the situation quietly.

”You could have the blue chamber, couldn't he, Farvie? and do your writing there.”

Lydia flashed her a reproachful glance. She would have scattered his papers and spilled the ink, rather than have him do a deed like that. If he did it, it was not with her good-will. Jeff had drawn his frown the tighter.

”I don't know whether I can do it,” he said. ”A man has got to know how to write.”

”You wrote some remarkable things for the _Nestor_,” said the colonel, now hesitating. It had been one of the rules he and the girls had concocted for the treatment of a returning prisoner, never to refer to stone walls and iron bars. But surely, he felt, Jeff needed encouragement.

Jeff was ruthless.

”That was all rot,” he said.

”What was?” Lydia darted at him. ”Didn't you mean what you said?”

”It was idiotic for the papers to take it up,” said Jeff. ”They got it all wrong. 'There's a man,' they said, 'in the Federal Prison, Jeffrey Blake, the defaulter. Very talented. Has revolutionised the _Nestor_, the prison organ. Let him out, pardon him, simply because he can write.'”

”As I understand,” said his father, ”you did get the name of the paper changed.”

”Well, now,” said Jeff, appealingly, in a candid way, ”what kind of name was that for a prison paper? _Nestor!_ 'Who was Nestor?' says the man that's been held up in the midst of his wine-swilling and money-getting.

Wise old man, he remembers. First-cla.s.s preacher. Turn on the tap and he'll give you a maxim. 'Gee!' says he, 'I don't want advice. I know how I got here, and if I ever get out, I'll see to it I don't get in again.'”

Lydia found this talk exceedingly diverting. She disapproved of it. She had wanted Jeff to appear a das.h.i.+ng, large-eyed, entirely innocent young man, his mouth, full of axioms, prepared to be the stay of Farvie's gentle years. But this rude torrent of perverse philosophy bore her along and she liked it, particularly because she felt she should presently contradict and show how much better she knew herself. Anne, too, evidently had an unlawful interest in it, and wanted him to keep on talking. She took that transparent way of furthering the flow by asking a question she could answer herself.

”You called it _Prison Talk_, didn't you?”

”Yes,” said Jeff. ”They called it _Prison Talk.”_

”And all our newspapers copied your articles,” said Anne, artfully guiding him forward, ”the ones you called 'The New Republic.'”

”What d'they want to copy them for?” asked Jeff. ”It was a fool thing to do. I'd simply written the letters to the men, to ask 'em if they didn't think the very devil of prison life was that we were outside. Not because we were inside, shut up in a jug. You could bear to be in a jug, if that was all. But you've got to have ties. You've got to have laws and the whole framework that's been built up from the cave man. Or you're desperate, don't you see? You're all alone. And a man will do a great deal not to be alone. If there's nothing for you to do but learn a trade, and be preached at by _Nestor_, and say to yourself, 'I'm outside'--why there's the devil in it.”

He was trying to convince them as he had previously convinced others, those others who had lived with him under the penal law. He looked at Anne much as if she were a State or Federal Board and incidentally at Lydia, as if he would say:

”Here's a very young and insignificant criminal. We'll return to her presently. But she, too, is going to be convinced.”

”And I don't say a man hasn't got to be infernally miserable when he's working out his sentence. He has. I don't want you to let up on him.

Only I don't want him to get punky, so he isn't fit to come back when his term is over. I don't believe it's going to do much for him merely to keep the laws he's been chucked under, against his will, though he's got to keep 'em, or they'll know the reason why.”

Lydia wondered who They were. She thought They might be brutal wardens and a.s.sembled before her, in a terrifying battalion, the strait-jackets and tortures she'd found in some of the older English novels.

”So I said to the men: 'We've got to govern ourselves. We haven't got a d.a.m.ned word'”--really abashed he looked at Anne--”I beg your pardon. 'We haven't got a word to say in this government we're under; but say we have. Say the only thing we can do is to give no trouble, fine ourselves, punish ourselves if we do. The worst thing that can happen to us,' I said, 'is to hate law. Well, the best law we've got is prison law. It's the only law that's going to touch us now. Let's love it as if it were our mother. And if it isn't tough enough, let's make it tougher.

Let's vote on it, and publish our votes in this paper.'”

”I was surprised,” said his father, ”that so much plain speaking was allowed.”