Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century -- Fiction
They flung his clothes upon his red-hot dripping skin, and Hodges
gave him a brutal push. “Go to your cell.” Robinson crawled off, often
wincing and trying in vain to keep his clothes from rubbing those parts
of his person where they had scrubbed the skin off him.
Hawes eyed him with grim superiority. Suddenly he had an inspiration.
“Come back!” shouted he. “I never was beat by a prisoner yet, and I
never will. Strap him up.” At this command even the turnkeys looked
amazed at one another and hesitated. Then the governor swore horribly at
them, and Hodges without another word went for the jacket.
They took hold of him; he made no resistance; he never even looked at
them. He never took his eye off Hawes; on him his eye fastened like a
basilisk. They took him away, and pinioned, jammed and throttled him to
the wall again. Hodges was set to watch him, and a bucket of water near
to throw over him should he show the least sign of shamming again. In
an hour another turnkey came and relieved Hodges--in another hour Fry
relieved him, for this was tiresome work for a poor turnkey--in another
hour a new hand relieved Fry, but nobody relieved No. 19.
Five mortal hours had he been in the vice without shamming. The pain his
skin suffered from the late remedies, and the deadly rage at his heart,
gave him unnatural powers of resistance; but at last the infernal
machine conquered, and he began to turn dead faint; then Hodges, his
sentinel at the time, caught up the bucket and dashed the whole contents
over him. The effect was magical; the shock took away his breath for a
moment, but the next the blood seemed to glow with fire in his veins and
he felt a general access of vigor to bear his torture. When this man had
been six hours in the vise the governor and his myrmidons came into the
yard and unstrapped him.
“You did not beat me, you see, after all,” said the governor to No. 19.
The turnkeys heard and revered their chief. No. 19 looked him full in
the face with an eye glittering like a saber, but said no word.
“Sulky brute!” cried the governor, “lock him up” (oath). And that
evening, as a warder was rolling the prisoners' supper along the little
natural railway made by the two railings of Corridor B, the governor
stepped the carriage and asked for 19's tin. It was given him, and he
abstracted one half of the man's gruel. “Refractory in the yard to-day;
but I'll break him before I've done with him” (oath).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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