The Eleventh Virgin · Part II · Chapter 2 3 (3/4)

It was a small, square stone room with an opening into the corridor which was barred. At night the guards hung blankets from the outside to keep out the light from the electric lamp in the middle of the hall.

There was a straw mattress flung in one corner which the two women had not noticed the night before. This June put on the bunk which had been built in one side of the cell and covered with one of her blankets. At that, it was anything but comfortable. There was nothing else in the cell, which was scantily heated by a pipe which ran through one wall.

Towards noon, June judged it must be noon because the sun had disappeared from the slit at the back of her cell, the guard came and told her she was allowed to wash and she accompanied him thankfully to a toilet room at the other end of the building.

And her oppression lifted for a moment when she saw Billy being led out of her cell at the same time, evidently for the same purpose. There was just time for a few moments whispered conversation while the two guards waited outside the washroom door.

“They’ve taken all the older women somewhere else,” Billy told her “and there’s just six of the youngest left here. These are the punishment cells and I guess they think we can stand it better than the old ladies.”

“We’ll probably all get pneumonia,” June said cheerfully. “This is worse than I thought it could possibly be. I’m aching with the cold and starving besides. How would you like to have a big steak from Brown’s Chop House?”

“Shut up, for goodness’ sake. Look, I slipped a couple of pencils in my shoe and some paper down the front of my dress. I’ve been drawing cartoons of Morrison all morning. If I only had some pins or something, I’d hang them on the wall for his approval when he makes his rounds.”

June accepted her friend’s offer to share the paper and take one of the pencils.

“I’ve gone through every pocket I have and only found a nail file and three handkerchiefs and I’ve been driven to making rag dolls as I did in school when I was bored to death.”

“I’m two cells away from you,” Billy said. “Get close to your door and holler to me whenever you want to. I’m not afraid of their old gags.”

There was no time for more than this for the guards were indelicately pounding at the door, and Billy just as indelicately irritating them by calling “come in,” which they could not do with the door locked. However, the girls thought it best to obey, fearing that the two men would vent their anger on the others when they were brought to wash, and went back quietly to their cells.

Somehow the afternoon passed and twilight fell, and the lights in the corridor were lit and shut out by blankets hung at the bars. And surprisingly enough, June fell asleep immediately, worn out by hunger and the aftermath of excitement and slept until late the following morning.

She woke cheerfully to the sound of Billy singing at the top of her lungs. She had no voice and evidently little sentiment, for the song was one of the Indian Love Lyrics, “Less than the dust beneath thy chariot wheels.”

“Stop that noise,” one of the guards bawled.

“Don’t you like it?” she asked them gently. “Maybe this one is better,” and she warbled a popular tune. But as soon as the men ceased to protest, she seemed to lose interest in music and there was silence again.

June had no opportunity to talk to her friend when they went to wash that morning. The prisoners were taken out one by one and locked in their cells before the next one’s return came in order that they might not pass in the corridor.

At noon the prisoners were offered milk and toast, but refused to touch what was brought to them. An hour later it was taken away and the ceremony was repeated that night. The guards did not bring the same milk and toast that had been refused that noon. No, it was piping hot and gave forth a most delicate odor through the damp smelliness of the cell. It was a refinement of torture.

“It’s a great temptation,” one of the girls called out, “but it’s much easier when you remember that if we once start to eat, we’ll go back immediately to prison fare and the work room. Remember the worms in the oatmeal!” Evidently she was one of those who had served sentence before.

And the third day of the hunger strike ended, drearily.

The vague greyness all about her became unspeakably depressing to June. The bar of gold which the sun left on the ceiling every morning for a short hour taunted her; and late in the afternoon when the cells were dim and the lights in the corridor were not yet lit, a heartbreaking conviction of the ugliness and futility of life came over her so that she could not cry, but only lie there in blank-eyed misery.

She lost all feeling of her own identity. She was no longer June Henreddy who regarded the obstacles of life as things to be met with a lifted chin and a smile. She could not throw back her head and shrug her shoulders and cast pain from her. A dull weight of it had descended upon her, the weight of the sorrow of all the world.

She thought of the little street girls she had known and talked and laughed with at Miss Prince’s home. She thought of the months they had sat in cells and ugly work rooms of prisons before they were sent to Miss Prince. What was there to look back on in life and what was there to look forward to?

She remembered the stories she had heard before she came to the workhouse of how Morrison had treated the prisoners handed over to him. The prison was one of the most modern. It was built on the cottage plan and men and women worked in the fields or sat at machines and sewed. Yet here were these solitary confinement cells, more bleak and barbarous than she could have imagined such cells could be. And there were stories of prisoners left in them for six months at a time. Six months! And thirty days stretched out before her interminable in their length. She would be utterly crushed by misery before she was released. There were stories too of a whipping-post, and bloodhounds wandering through the grounds to terrorize the prisoners. These things had been sworn to before a notary public by a former matron of the workhouse and the superintendent had not taken the trouble to deny them.

And June lay there, passively enduring, after forcing her way into jail with thirty-seven other women⁠—all in order that the papers might give the cause publicity and make the public think about suffrage. She could not realize what good suffrage would do when it came. Prisons had been undergoing a process of reform for a good many years and they would continue to be reformed until all prisons were abolished. Then Miss Prince’s dream would come true.

The ultimate idea of the women who were at the head of the Birth Control Movement was the same. They alleviated conditions by starting a clinic and teaching women how to limit their families to the number they could afford to care for.

But many of the women who belonged to the suffrage party didn’t believe in birth control, women in the birth control movement sniffed at the militant tactics of the suffragists, and both thought that Miss Prince’s work to help street women futile. While Miss Prince in turn disapproved of both birth control and militant suffrage and was in favor of the war. And pacifist women sniffed at the others. If they would only work together! But each group worked for its own end and ignored all others when they were not in active opposition to them.

The war entered too in June’s survey of life. Most women were blindly patriotic and accepted the idea of war without knowing what war was. Everybody agreed that wars must end but as long as women who did none of the fighting entered into the idea of war with more than masculine enthusiasm, fighting would go on forever.

What was needed was a radical party whose platform would include such planks as birth control, pacifism, suffrage. You might as well indulge in the dreams of the Utopians and ignore the present day.

Meanwhile the incomplete and sullen silence of the place was broken by the far-off squealing of pigs at their evening meal, by the twitter of a sparrow just outside the ventilator, an occasional shuffle from a cell along the corridor as someone turned on her straw mattress.

These suppressed sounds tortured June. But worst of all were the hurrying footsteps. They were never moderate or leisurely or happy or complacent. Even the slowest of them hurried in a drugged sort of way.

If she could only detach them from the crowding thoughts of her mind. If she could only set them apart for what they were as she could the twitter of a bird. But do what she would they aroused a frantic feeling. A rush of thought, of expectancy came with them. She knew that something was about to happen; she hoped with all her heart that something would happen. And then nothing happened.

She had not realized before how grey footsteps could be. When she went to the bars of the cell to ask the guard for a glass of water she suddenly realized that her footsteps were as grey as his.

That night heavy dreams came upon her. She could remember few of them afterward, but there was one that aroused her trembling with perspiration and shaking all over. She had been in a theatre where a benefit performance was about to be given to a crowd of little children from a house of correction. They filled the main floor and the balcony and were chatteringly expectant. No one tried to keep them quiet and it was an ominous leniency.

When the actors came on and the play began a dread silence came on the young audience and whimperings of fear. For the players wore frightful death masks and were crippled and gruesome in body. One little child in the balcony gave a sudden shriek as he leaned over the railing and then as suddenly died. His limp body hurtled down on the children below and June’s horror awakened her.

The cry seemed to ring in her ears still and the darkness fell against her so oppressively that she felt she could push it away with her hands.

There were other nightmares which came to her those nights of the hunger strike. One she had several times in her childhood and her mother had always come to her bedside to hold her hand until she fell asleep again. Somewhere, it seemed, someone was making cake batter in a huge bowl and the beating began far off in the distance and became louder and louder until she was totally surrounded by the hideous clamor and wrested herself from sleep.

Harder to shake from her was the feeling which came to her as she was about to drop into a doze. She felt herself swelling larger and larger and nothing would dispel the impression until she sat straight up in bed and pinched at herself to keep awake.

She lay and sobbed finally at the futility of trying either to sleep or to remain awake.

For five days the toast and warm milk was brought to the cell three times a day, and three times a day it was taken away. If you drank all the hot water you could when you were led tottering to the washroom at the end of the corridor and then clamored all the rest of the day for more hot water, you could get rid of the empty feeling. The hunger wasn’t so bad, it was the dimness and the cold.

One of the Christian Scientists asked the guard for a Bible and Bibles were passed around to all of them.

“Know the truth, Betty dear,” one of them called out to her sister and the other one said, “Yes, I’m reading the ninety-first psalm.”

June tried to memorize it but the verses became strangely jumbled. Occasionally Billy piped out at her and sometimes she sang. June blessed her.

The sixth day came with hurrying footsteps and this time something happened. The six girls who remained in the punishment cells received visits from no less than three doctors and later in the day were taken out into the cool, crisp autumn day where they could see the sun setting over the woods at one side of the colony.

Their new quarters were in the hospital building where the rest of the women had been confined and owing to lack of room, two were put in each narrow room. Billy and June were together, and there were no nightmares that night. Whenever they pleased they were allowed out of their rooms by the matron who sat sewing in the warm hall and two by two they could go down to the shower room at the end of the hall and bathe and drink all the water they wished.

And the next day the strike was broken by the announcement that in a few days they would be transferred to the jail where they should have been received in the first place. Their clothes were returned to them and the chubby-faced matron and white-clad intern tried to provide them all with books and magazines.

The remaining days were marked by delicious but hardly satisfying meals of milk, toast and finally a chicken dinner. Then the thirty-five prisoners were piled into touring cars and driven to Washington through the invigorating air with a smell of snow in it. It was the first week in November and the woods still glowed in spots and the sun was warm.

“The Washington jail is a joke,” said Billy. “In fact the whole thing is a joke, now that we’ve got out of those damnable punishment cells. Notice the protesting way they accept us when we came this afternoon?”

“They’ve certainly granted our demands to be treated as political prisoners,” June agreed, “even though they haven’t formally announced the fact. I’ve been put on a diet of four eggs and a quart of milk a day and given permission to buy all the fruit I want. And this morning I received a package of letters from my admirers, all unopened and I have four books to read.”

The cell that had been assigned to the two⁠—or rather which they had chosen for themselves, for they had been turned loose in the female section and allowed to choose from three tiers of cells⁠—was on the top tier and furthest from the matron’s prying eye. There was more air there, too, for the high windows which stretched from the first to the third tier were kept open at the top by the request of the suffragists, a request which was granted after previous skirmishes. The first prisoners who had come to the Washington jail had broken the windows with whatever there was at hand to throw when the matron refused to keep them open. Also they had been kept locked in their cells while the present thirty-five were allowed freedom to wander around the female quarters from eight o’clock in the morning until eight at night. Then the gates clanged and the lights went out and all you could do was lie in bed and talk.

On the other side of the female quarter were the cells for colored prisoners, most of whom worked around the jail. There were three girls awaiting trial for murder and many who had been arrested for disorderly conduct and drunkenness. They kept up their chatter after eight o’clock at night and giggled and sang and quarreled, laughing at the matron who puffed up and down the steps to quiet them.

Before the gates were closed and the work for the day was over there were card games on the third tier while one darky kept a lookout for the matron; and shimmy dances up and down the corridor while a row of black faces gleamed along the line and hands beat time to the steps of the dancers.

Saturday night the six tubs at the end of the corridor⁠—the suffragists could not bathe because the same tubs were used by the colored girls⁠—were filled again and again and there was a steady tumult while the girls scrubbed and primped and bound their hair down around their heads in order that it would be straight for the next day.