An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (i can read book club .TXT) 📕

in the mush gallery couldn’t think of somepin else besides cold beans and fried potatoes and coffee.”

“The coffee tonight⁠ ⁠… oh, boy!⁠ ⁠… Now in the jail at Buffalo⁠—though⁠ ⁠…”

“Oh, cut it out,” came from another corner. “We’ve heard enough about the jail at Buffalo and your swell chow. You don’t show any afternoon tea appetite around here, I notice.”

“Just the same,” continued the first voice, “as I look back on’t now, it musta been pretty good. Dat’s a way it seems, anyhow, now.”

“Oh, Rafferty, do let up,” called still another.

And then, presumably “Rafferty” once more, who said: “Now, I’ll just take a little siesta after dis⁠—and den I’ll call me chauffeur and go for a little spin. De air tonight must be fine.”

Then from still another hoarse voice: “Oh, you with your sick imagination. Say, I’d give me life for a smoker. And den a good game of cards.”

“Do they play cards here?” thought Clyde.

“I suppose since Rosenstein was defeated for mayor here he won’t play.”

“Won’t he, though?” This presumably from Rosenstein.

To Clyde’s left, in the cell next to him, a voice, to a passing guard, low and yet distinctly audible: “Psst! Any word from Albany yet?”

“No word, Herman.”

“And no letter, I suppose.”

“No letter.”

The voice was very strained, very tense, very miserable, and after this, silence.

A moment later, from another cell farther off, a voice from the lowest hell to which a soul can descend⁠—complete and unutterable despair⁠—“Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

And then from the tier above another voice: “Oh, Jesus! Is that farmer going to begin again? I can’t stand it. Guard! Guard! Can’t you get some dope for that guy?”

Once more the voice from the lowest: “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

Clyde was up, his fingers clinched. His nerves were as taut as cords about to snap. A murderer! And about to die, perhaps. Or grieving over some terrible thing like his own fate. Moaning⁠—as he in spirit at least had so often moaned there in Bridgeburg. Crying like that! God! And there must be others!

And day after day and night after night more of this, no doubt, until, maybe⁠—who could tell⁠—unless. But, oh, no! Oh, no! Not himself⁠—not that⁠—not his day. Oh, no. A whole year must elapse before that could possibly happen⁠—or so Jephson had said. Maybe two. But, at that⁠—!⁠ ⁠… in two years!!! He found himself stricken with an ague because of the thought that even in so brief a time as two years⁠ ⁠…

That other room! It was in here somewhere too. This room was connected with it. He knew that. There was a door. It led to that chair. That chair.

And then the voice again, as before, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

He sank to his couch and covered his ears with his hands.

XXIX

The “death house” in this particular prison was one of those crass erections and maintenances of human insensitiveness and stupidity principally for which no one primarily was really responsible. Indeed, its total plan and procedure were the results of a series of primary legislative enactments, followed by decisions and compulsions as devised by the temperaments and seeming necessities of various wardens, until at last⁠—by degrees and without anything worthy of the name of thinking on anyone’s part⁠—there had been gathered and was now being enforced all that could possibly be imagined in the way of unnecessary and really unauthorized cruelty or stupid and destructive torture. And to the end that a man, once condemned by a jury, would be compelled to suffer not alone the death for which his sentence called, but a thousand others before that. For the very room by its arrangement, as well as the rules governing the lives and actions of the inmates, was sufficient to bring about this torture, willy-nilly.

It was a room thirty by fifty feet, of stone and concrete and steel, and surmounted some thirty feet from the floor by a skylight. Presumably an improvement over an older and worse death house, with which it was still connected by a door, it was divided lengthwise by a broad passage, along which, on the ground floor, were twelve cells, six on a side and eight by ten each and facing each other. And above again a second tier of what were known as balcony cells⁠—five on a side.

There was, however, at the center of this main passage⁠—and dividing these lower cells equally as to number⁠—a second and narrower passage, which at one end gave into what was now known as the Old Death House (where at present only visitors to the inmates of the new Death House were received), and at the other into the execution room in which stood the electric chair. Two of the cells on the lower passage⁠—those at the junction of the narrower passage⁠—faced the execution-room door. The two opposite these, on the corresponding corners, faced the passage that gave into the Old Death House or what now by a large stretch of the imagination, could be called the condemned men’s reception room, where twice weekly an immediate relative or a lawyer might be met. But no others.

In the Old Death House (or present reception room), the cells still there, and an integral part of this reception plan, were all in a row and on one side only of a corridor, thus preventing prying inspection by one inmate of another, and with a wire screen in front as well as green shades which might be drawn in front of each cell. For, in an older day, whenever a new convict arrived or departed, or took his daily walk, or went for his bath, or was led eventually through the little iron door to the west where formerly was the execution chamber, these shades were drawn. He was not supposed to be seen by his associates. Yet the old death house, because of this very courtesy and privacy, although intense solitude, was later deemed inhuman and hence this newer and better death house,