FullReads

Yet I am not ashamed–only comfortably dulled and a little tired–dully interested and observant, and hopeful for the sunlight presently. We low persons get too great a contempt for things to feel much ashamed at any time; and this very contempt keeps many of us from “reforming.” We hear too many lies sworn that we know to be lies, and see too many unjust and brutal things done that we know to be brutal and unjust.

But let us go back a bit, and suppose we are still waiting for the magistrate, and think of Last Night. “Silence!”–but from no human voice this time. The whispering, shuffling, and clicking of the court typewriter ceases, the scene darkens, and the court is blotted out as a scene is blotted out from the sight of a man who has thrown himself into a mesmeric trance. And:

Drink–lurid recollection of being “searched”—clang of iron cell door, and I grope for and crawl on to the slanting plank. Period of oblivion–or the soul is away in some other world. Clang of cell door again, and soul returns in a hurry to take heed of another soul, belonging to a belated drunk on the plank by my side. Other soul says:

“Gotta match?”

So we’re not in hell yet.

We fumble and light up. They leave us our pipes, tobacco and matches; presently, one knocks with his pipe on the iron trap of the door and asks for water, which is brought in a tin pint-pot. Then follow intervals of smoking, incoherent mutterings that pass for conversation, borrowings of matches, knockings with the pannikin on the cell door wicket or trap for more water, matches, and bail; false and fitful starts into slumber perhaps–or wild attempts at flight on the part of our souls into that other world that the sober and sane know nothing of; and, gradually, suddenly it seems, reason (if this world is reasonable) comes back.

“What’s your trouble!”

“Don’t know. Bomb outrage, perhaps.”

“Drunk?”

“Yes.”

“What’s yours!”

“Same boat.”

But presently he is plainly uneasy (and I am getting that way, too, to tell the truth), and, after moving about, and walking up and down in the narrow space as well as we can, he “rings up” another policeman, who happens to be the fat one who is to be in charge all night.

“Wot’s up here?”

“What have I been up to?”

“Killin’ a Chinaman. Go to sleep.”

Policeman peers in at me inquiringly, but I forbear to ask questions.

Blankets are thrown in by a friend of mine in the force, though we are not entitled to them until we are bailed or removed to the “paddock” (the big drunks’ dormitory and dining cell at the Central), and we proceed to make ourselves comfortable. My mate wonders whether he asked them to send to his wife to get bail, and hopes he didn’t.

They have left our wicket open, seeing, or rather hearing, that we are quiet. But they have seemingly left some other wickets open also, for from a neighbouring cell comes the voice of Mrs Johnson holding forth. The locomotive has apparently just been run into the cleaning sheds, and her fires have not had time to cool. They say that Mrs Johnson was a “lady once,” like many of her kind; that she is not a “bad woman”–that is, not a woman of loose character–but gets money sent to her from somewhere–from her “family,” or her husband, perhaps. But when she lets herself loose–or, rather, when the beer lets her loose–she is a tornado and a terror in Red Rock Lane, and it is only her fierce, practical kindness to her unfortunate or poverty-stricken sisters in her sober moments that keeps her forgiven in that classic thoroughfare. She can certainly speak “like a lady” when she likes, and like an intelligent, even a clever, woman–not like a “woman of the world,” but as a woman who knew and knows the world, and is in hell. But now her language is the language of a rough shearer in a “rough shed” on a blazing hot day.