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. ? Chapter 29
T he “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 any one’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, as the thoughtful and condescending authorities saw it, was devised.
In this, to be sure, were no such small and gloomy cells as those which characterized the old, for there the ceiling was low and the sanitary arrangements wretched, whereas in the new one the ceiling was high, the rooms and corridors brightly lighted and in every instance no less than eight by ten feet in size.
But by contrast with the older room, they had the enormous disadvantage of the unscreened if not uncurtained cell doors.
Besides, by housing all together in two such tiers as were here, it placed upon each convict the compulsion of enduring all the horrors of all the vicious, morbid or completely collapsed and despairing temperaments about him.
No true privacy of any kind.
By day — a blaze of light pouring through an over-arching skylight high above the walls.
By night — glistening incandescents of large size and power which flooded each nook and cranny of the various cells.
No privacy, no games other than cards and checkers — the only ones playable without releasing the prisoners from their cells.
Books, newspapers, to be sure, for all who could read or enjoy them under the circumstances.
And visits — mornings and afternoons, as a rule, from a priest, and less regularly from a rabbi and a Protestant minister, each offering his sympathies or services to such as would accept them.
But the curse of the place was not because of these advantages, such as they were, but in spite of them — this unremitted contact, as any one could see, with minds now terrorized and discolored by the thought of an approaching death that was so near for many that it was as an icy hand upon the brow or shoulder.
And none — whatever the bravado — capable of enduring it without mental or physical deterioration in some form.
The glooms — the strains — the indefinable terrors and despairs that blew like winds or breaths about this place and depressed or terrorized all by turns!
They were manifest at the most unexpected moments, by curses, sighs, tears even, calls for a song — for God’s sake! — or the most unintended and unexpected yells or groans.
Worse yet, and productive of perhaps the most grinding and destroying of all the miseries here — the transverse passage leading between the old death house on the one hand and the execution-chamber on the other.
For this from time to time — alas, how frequently — was the scene or stage for at least a part of the tragedy that was here so regularly enacted — the final business of execution.
For through this passage, on his last day, a man was transferred from his BETTER cell in the new building, where he might have been incarcerated for so much as a year or two, to one of the older ones in the old death house, in order that he might spend his last hours in solitude, although compelled at the final moment, none-the-less (the death march), to retrace his steps along this narrower cross passage — and where all might see — into the execution chamber at the other end of it.
Also at any time, in going to visit a lawyer or relative brought into the old death house for this purpose, it was necessary to pass along the middle passage to this smaller one and so into the old death house, there to be housed in a cell, fronted by a wire screen two feet distant, between which and the cell proper a guard must sit while a prisoner and his guest (wife, son, mother, daughter, brother, lawyer) should converse — the guard hearing all.