“No, sir.”
“Well, I might put you into the Arts and Crafts Workshop. I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression. At last we have the opportunity for testing it. Are you an extravert or an introvert?”
“I’m afraid I’m not sure, sir.”
“So few people are. I’m trying to induce the Home Office to instal an official psychoanalyst. Do you read the New Nation, I wonder? There is rather a flattering article this week about our prison called ‘The Lucas-Dockery Experiments.’ I like the prisoners to know these things. It gives them corporate pride. I may give you one small example of the work we are doing that affects your own case. Up till now all offences connected with prostitution have been put into the sexual category. Now I hold that an offence of your kind is essentially acquisitive and shall grade it accordingly. It does not, of course, make any difference as far as your conditions of imprisonment are concerned—the routine of penal servitude is prescribed by Standing Orders—but you see what a difference it makes to the annual statistics.”
“The human touch,” said Sir Wilfred after Paul had been led from the room, “I’m sure it makes all the difference. You could see with that unfortunate man just now what a difference it made to him to think that, far from being a mere nameless slave, he has now become part of a great revolution in statistics.”
“Yes, sir,” said the Chief Warder; “and, by the way, there are two more attempted suicides being brought up tomorrow. You must really be more strict with them, sir. Those sharp tools you’ve issued to the Arts and Crafts School is just putting temptation in the men’s way.”
Paul was once more locked in, and for the first time had the opportunity of examining his cell. There was little to interest him. Besides his Bible, his book of devotion—Prayers on Various Occasions of Illness, Uncertainty and Loss, by the Rev. Septimus Bead, M.A., Edinburgh, 1863—and his English Grammar, there was a little glazed pint pot, a knife and spoon, a slate and slate-pencil, a salt-jar, a metal water-can, two earthenware vessels, some cleaning materials, a plank bed upright against the wall, a roll of bedding, a stool and a table. A printed notice informed him that he was not permitted to look out of the window. Three printed cards on the wall contained a list of other punishable offences, which seemed to include every human activity, some Church of England prayers, and an explanation of the “system of progressive stages.” There was also a typewritten “Thought for the Day,” one of Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery’s little innovations. The message for the first day of Paul’s imprisonment was: “Sense of Sin is Sense of Waste, the Editor of the Sunday Express.” Paul studied the system of progressive stages with interest. After four weeks, he read, he would be allowed to join in associated labour, to take half an hour’s exercise on Sundays, to wear a stripe on his arm, if illiterate to have school instruction, to take one work of fiction from the library weekly, and, if special application were made to the Governor, to exhibit four photographs of his relatives or of approved friends; after eight weeks, provided that his conduct was perfectly satisfactory, he might receive a visit of twenty minutes’ duration and write and receive a letter. Six weeks later he might receive another visit and another letter and another library book weekly.
Would Davy Lennox’s picture of the back of Margot’s head be accepted as the photograph of an approved friend, he wondered?
After a time his door was unlocked again and opened a few inches. A hand thrust in a tin, and a voice said: “Pint pot quick!” Paul’s mug was filled with cocoa, and the door was again locked. The tin contained bread, bacon and beans. That was the last interruption for fourteen hours. Paul fell into a reverie. It was the first time he had been really alone for months. How very refreshing it was, he reflected.
The next four weeks of solitary confinement were among the happiest of Paul’s life. The physical comforts were certainly meagre, but at the Ritz Paul had learned to appreciate the inadequacy of purely physical comfort. It was so exhilarating, he found, never to have to make any decision on any subject, to be wholly relieved from the smallest consideration of time, meals or clothes, to have no anxiety ever about what kind of impression he was making; in fact, to be free. At some rather chilly time in the early morning a bell would ring, and the warder would say: “Slops outside!”; he would rise, roll up his bedding, and dress; there was no need to shave, no hesitation about what tie he should wear, none of the fidgeting with studs and collars and links that so distracts the waking moments of civilized man. He felt like the happy people in the advertisements for shaving soap who seem to have achieved very simply that peace of mind so distant and so desirable in the early morning. For about an hour he stitched away at a mailbag, until his door was again unlocked to admit a hand with a lump of bread and a large ladle of porridge. After breakfast he gave a cursory polish to the furniture and crockery of his cell and did some more sewing until the bell rang for chapel. For a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes he heard Mr. Prendergast blaspheming against the beauties of sixteenth-century diction. This was certainly a bore, and so was the next hour, during
