XIX
Even for a violent ward my entrance was spectacular—if not dramatic.
The three attendants regularly in charge naturally jumped to the
conclusion that, in me, a troublesome patient had been foisted upon
them. They noted my arrival with an unpleasant curiosity, which in turn
aroused my curiosity, for it took but a glance to convince me that my
burly keepers were typical attendants of the brute-force type. Acting
on the order of the doctor in charge, one of them stripped me of my
outer garments; and, clad in nothing but underclothes, I was thrust
into a cell.
Few, if any, prisons in this country contain worse holes than this cell
proved to be. It was one of five, situated in a short corridor
adjoining the main ward. It was about six feet wide by ten long and of
a good height. A heavily screened and barred window admitted light and
a negligible quantity of air, for the ventilation scarcely deserved the
name. The walls and floor were bare, and there was no furniture. A
patient confined here must lie on the floor with no substitute for a
bed but one or two felt druggets. Sleeping under such conditions
becomes tolerable after a time, but not until one has become accustomed
to lying on a surface nearly as hard as a stone. Here (as well, indeed,
as in other parts of the ward) for a period of three weeks I was again
forced to breathe and rebreathe air so vitiated that even when I
occupied a larger room in the same ward, doctors and attendants seldom
entered without remarking its quality.
My first meal increased my distaste for my semi-sociological
experiment. For over a month I was kept in a half-starved condition. At
each meal, to be sure, I was given as much food as was served to other
patients, but an average portion was not adequate to the needs of a
patient as active as I was at this time.
Worst of all, winter was approaching and these, my first quarters, were
without heat. As my olfactory nerves soon became uncommunicative, the
breathing of foul air was not a hardship. On the other hand, to be
famished the greater part of the time was a very conscious hardship.
But to be half-frozen, day in and day out for a long period, was
exquisite torture. Of all the suffering I endured, that occasioned by
confinement in cold cells seems to have made the most lasting
impression. Hunger is a local disturbance, but when one is cold, every
nerve in the body registers its call for help. Long before reading a
certain passage of De Quincey's I had decided that cold could cause
greater suffering than hunger; consequently, it was with great
satisfaction that I read the following sentences from his
"Confessions": "O ancient women, daughters of toil and suffering, among
all the hardships and bitter inheritances of flesh that ye are called
upon to face, not one—not even hunger—seems in my eyes comparable to
that of nightly cold.... A more killing curse there does not exist for
man or woman than the bitter combat between the weariness that prompts
sleep and the keen, searching cold that forces you from that first
access of sleep to start up horror-stricken, and to seek warmth vainly
in renewed exercise, though long since fainting under fatigue."
The hardness of the bed and the coldness of the room were not all that
interfered with sleep. The short corridor in which I was placed was
known as the "Bull Pen"—a phrase eschewed by the doctors. It was
usually in an uproar, especially during the dark hours of the early
morning. Patients in a state of excitement may sleep during the first
hours of the night, but seldom all night; and even should one have the
capacity to do so, his companions in durance would wake him with a
shout or a song or a curse or the kicking of a door. A noisy and
chaotic medley frequently continued without interruption for hours at a
time. Noise, unearthly noise, was the poetic license allowed the
occupants of these cells. I spent several days and nights in one or
another of them, and I question whether I averaged more than two or
three hours' sleep a night during that time. Seldom did the regular
attendants pay any attention to the noise, though even they must at
times have been disturbed by it. In fact the only person likely to
attempt to stop it was the night watch, who, when he did enter a cell
for that purpose, almost invariably kicked or choked the noisy patient
into a state of temporary quiet. I noted this and scented trouble.
Drawing and writing materials having been again taken from me, I cast
about for some new occupation. I found one in the problem of warmth.
Though I gave repeated expression to the benumbed messages of my
tortured nerves, the doctor refused to return my clothes. For a
semblance of warmth I was forced to depend upon ordinary undergarments
and an extraordinary imagination. The heavy felt druggets were about as
plastic as blotting paper and I derived little comfort from them until
I hit upon the idea of rending them into strips. These strips I would
weave into a crude Rip Van Winkle kind of suit; and so intricate was
the warp and woof that on several occasions an attendant had to cut me
out of these sartorial improvisations. At first, until I acquired the
destructive knack, the tearing of one drugget into strips was a task of
four or five hours. But in time I became so proficient that I could
completely destroy more than one of these six-by-eight-foot druggets in
a single night. During the following weeks of my close confinement I
destroyed at least twenty of them, each worth, as I found out later,
about four dollars; and I confess I found a peculiar satisfaction in
the destruction of property belonging to a State which had deprived me
of all my effects except underclothes. But my destructiveness was due
to a variety of causes. It was occasioned primarily by a "pressure of
activity," for which the tearing of druggets served as a vent. I was in
a state of mind aptly described in a letter written during my first
month of elation, in which I said, "I'm as busy as a nest of ants."
Though the habit of tearing druggets was the outgrowth of an abnormal
impulse, the habit itself lasted longer than it could have done had I
not, for so long a time, been deprived of suitable clothes and been
held a prisoner in cold cells. But another motive soon asserted itself.
Being deprived of all the luxuries of life and most of the necessities,
my mother wit, always conspiring with a wild imagination for something
to occupy my tune, led me at last to invade the field of invention.
With appropriate contrariety, an unfamiliar and hitherto almost
detested line of investigation now attracted me. Abstruse mathematical
problems which had defied solution for centuries began to appear easy.
To defy the State and its puny representatives had become mere child's
play. So I forthwith decided to overcome no less a force than gravity
itself.
My conquering imagination soon tricked me into believing that I could
lift myself by my boot-straps—or rather that I could do so when my
laboratory should contain footgear that lent itself to the experiment.
But what of the strips of felt torn from the druggets? Why, these I
used as the straps of my missing boots; and having no boots to stand
in, I used my bed as boots. I reasoned that for my scientific purpose a
man in bed was as favorably situated as a man in boots. Therefore,
attaching a sufficient number of my felt strips to the head and foot of
the bed (which happened not to be screwed to the floor), and, in turn,
attaching the free ends to the transom and the window guard, I found
the problem very simple. For I next joined these cloth cables in such
manner that by pulling downward I effected a readjustment of stress and
strain, and my bed, with me in it, was soon dangling in space. My
sensations at this momentous instant must have been much like those
which thrilled Newton when he solved one of the riddles of the
universe. Indeed, they must have been more intense, for Newton,
knowing, had his doubts; I, not knowing, had no doubts at all. So
epoch-making did this discovery appear to me that I noted the exact
position of the bed so that a wondering posterity might ever afterward
view and revere the exact spot on the earth's surface whence one of
man's greatest thoughts had winged its way to immortality.
For weeks I believed I had uncovered a mechanical principle which would
enable man to defy gravity. And I talked freely and confidently about
it. That is, I proclaimed the impending results. The intermediate steps
in the solution of my problem I ignored, for good reasons. A blind man
may harness a horse. So long as the horse is harnessed, one need not
know the office of each strap and buckle. Gravity was harnessed—that
was all. Meanwhile I felt sure that another sublime moment of
inspiration would intervene and clear the atmosphere, thus rendering
flight of the body as easy as a flight of imagination.
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