Alfred Allen was one of my early acquaintances among prisoners, having had the good fortune to receive his sentence on a second conviction before the habitual-criminal act was in force in Illinois. Our introduction happened in this way: in one of my interviews with a young confidence man, who did not hesitate to state that he had always been studying how to sell the imitation for the genuine, to get something for nothing, my attention was diverted by his suddenly branching off into a description of his cell-mate.
"Alfred is the queerest sort of a chap," the man began. "He's a professional burglar, and the most innocent fellow I ever knew; always reading history and political economy, and just wild to get into the library to work. He hasn't a relative that he knows and never has a visit nor a letter, and I wish you'd ask to see him."
On this introduction I promised to interview Alfred Allen the next evening. The warden [Pg 60]allowed me the privilege of evening interviews with prisoners, the time limited only by the hour when every man must be in his cell for the night.
It was an unprecedented event for Alfred to be called out to see a visitor, and he greeted me with a broad smile and two outstretched hands. With that first hand-clasp we were friends, for the door of that starved and eager heart was thrown generously open and all his soul was in his big dark eyes. I understood instantly what the other man meant by calling Alfred "innocent," for a more direct and guileless nature I have never known. The boy, for he was not yet twenty-one, had so many things to say. The flood-gates were open at last. I remember his suddenly pausing, then exclaiming: "Why, how strange this is! Ten minutes ago I'd never seen you, and now I feel as if I'd known you all my life."
In reply to my inquiries he rapidly sketched the main events in his history. Of Welsh parentage he had learned to read before he was five years old, when his mother died. While yet a child he lost his father, and when ten years old, a homeless waif, morally and physically starving, in the struggle for existence he was a bootblack, newsboy, and sometimes thief. "To get something[Pg 61] to eat, clothes to cover me, and a place to sleep was my only thought; these things I must have. Often in the day I looked for a place where the sun had warmed the sidewalk beside barrels, and I'd go there to sleep at night."
At last, when about thirteen years old, he found a friendly, helping hand. A man whose boots he had blacked several times, who doubtless sized up Alfred as to ability, took the boy to his house, fed him well, and clothed him comfortably. Very anxiously did the older man, who must have felt Alfred's intrinsic honesty, unfold to the boy the secret of his calling and the source from which he garnered the money spent for the comfort of the street waif. And Alfred had small scruple in consenting to aid his protector by wriggling his supple young body through small apertures into buildings which he had no right to enter. And so he was drifted into the lucrative business of store burglary.[6] After the strain and stress and desperate scramble for existence of the lonely child, one can imagine how easily he embraced this new vocation. It was a kind of life, too, which had its fascination for his adventurous spirit; it even enabled him to indulge in what was[Pg 62] to him the greatest of luxuries, the luxury of giving. His own hardships had made him keenly sensitive to the suffering of others. But Alfred was not of the stuff from which successful criminals are made, for at eighteen he was in prison for the second time and was classed with the incorrigible.
It was during this last imprisonment that thought and study had developed his dominant trait of generosity into a broader altruism. He now realized that he could serve humanity better than by stealing money to give away. He was studying the conditions of the working and of the criminal classes, the needs of the side of society from which he was an outgrowth. The starting-point of this change was an Englishman's report of a visit to this country as "A place where each lived for the good of all." (?) "When I read that," said Alfred, "I stopped and asked myself: 'Have I been living for the good of all?' And I saw how I had been an enemy to society, and that I must start again in the opposite direction." It was not the cruelty of social conditions which he accused for his past. His good Welsh conscience came bravely forward and convicted him of his own share in social wrong-doing. "Now that I'm[Pg 63] going to be a good man," Alfred continued, "I suppose I must be a Christian"—reversing the usual order of "conversion"—"and so I've been studying religion also lately. I've been hard at work trying to understand the Trinity." Alfred did not undertake things by halves.
I advised him not to bother with theology, but to content himself with the clear and simple working principles of Christianity, which would really count for something in his future battle with life.
When we touched upon books I was surprised to find this boy perfectly at home with his Thackeray and his Scott, and far more deeply read in history and political economy than I. He said that he had always read, as a newsboy at news-stands, at mission reading-rooms, wherever he could lay his hands on a book. He talked fluently, picturesquely, with absolute freedom from self-consciousness.
In Alfred's physiognomy—his photograph lies before me—there was no trace of the so-called criminal type; his face was distinctively that of the student, the thinker, the enthusiast. His fate seemed such a cruel waste of a piece of humanity of fine fibre, with a brain that would have made[Pg 64] a brilliant record in any university. But the moral and physical deprivations from which his boyhood suffered had wrought havoc with his health and undermined his constitution.
This November interview resulted immediately in a correspondence, limited on Alfred's side to the rule allowing convicts to write but one letter a month. On my part, the letters were more frequent, and magazines for the Sundays were regularly sent. Alfred was a novice in correspondence, probably not having written fifty letters in his life. I was surprised at the high average of his spelling and the uniform excellency of his handwriting. In order to make the most of the allotted one leaf of foolscap paper he left no margins and soon evolved a small, upright writing, clear and almost as fine as magazine type.
In using Alfred's letters I wish I might impart to others the power to read between the lines that was given me through my acquaintance with the writer. I could hear the ring in his voice and often divine the thought greater than the word. But in letting him speak for himself he will at least have the advantage of coming directly in contact with the mind of the reader. The first extracts are taken from one of his earliest letters.
[Pg 65]
"My Dear Friend:
"On coming back to my cell the day after Christmas, I saw a letter, a magazine and a book lying on my bed. I knew from the handwriting that they came from you. After looking at my present and reading the sunshiny letter I tried to eat my dinner. But there was a lump in my throat that would not let me eat, and before I knew what was up I was crying over my dear friend's remembrance. I was once at a Mission Christmas tree where I received a box of candy. But yours was my first individual gift. It is said that the three most beautiful words in the English language are Mother, Home and Heaven. I have never known any of them. My first remembrance is of being in a room with the dead body of my mother. All my life it seems as if everybody I knew belonged to some one; they had mother, brother, sister, some one. But I belonged to no one, and I never could repress the longing in my heart to belong to somebody. I have my God, but a human heart cannot help longing for human as well as divine sympathy."
In a similar vein in another letter he writes:
"I've sometimes wondered if I should have[Pg 66] been a different boy if circumstances in my childhood had been better. I have seen little but misery in life. In prison and out it has been my fate to belong to the class that gets pushed to the wall. I have walked the streets of Chicago to keep myself from freezing to death. I have slept on the ground with the rain pouring down upon me. For two years I did not know what bed was, while more than once I have only broken the fast of two or three days through the kindness of a gambler or a thief. This was before I had taken to criminal life as a business.... Still when I think it over I don't see how I could have kept in that criminal life. I remember the man who taught me burglary as a fine art told me I would never make a good burglar because I was too quick to feel for others."
Only once again did Alfred refer to the bitter experiences of his childhood and that was in a conversation. He had many other things to write about, and his mind was filled with the present and the future. Four years of evenings in a cell in a prison with a good library give one a chance to read and think, although an ill-lighted, non-ventilated four-by-seven cell, after a day of exhausting work, is not conducive to intellectual[Pg 67] activity. The godsend this prison library was to Alfred is evident through his letters.
"All my life," he writes, "I have had a burning desire to study and educate myself, and I do not believe that a day has passed when I have not gone a little higher. Some time ago I determined to read a chapter in the new testament every night, though I expected it would be tedious. But behold! The first thing I knew I was so interested that I was reading four or five chapters every night. The Chaplain gave me a splendid speller and I'm going to study hard until I know every word in it."
Proof that Alfred was a genuine book-lover runs through many of his letters. He tells me:
"Much as I hate this place if I could be transferred to the library from the shop I should be the happiest boy in the State. I'd be willing to stay an additional year in the prison. Twice when they needed an extra man in the library they sent me. It was a joy just to handle the books and to read their titles and I felt as if they knew that I loved them.... Thank you for the Scribner Magazine. But the leaves were uncut. I want all the help and friendship you can spare me. I am glad to have any magazine you are[Pg 68] through with. But you must not buy new ones just for me. The Eclectic and Harpers were most welcome. Man versus the State was a splendid article, also, Education as a Factor in Prison Reform, and Prof. Ely on the Railroad Problem. The magazines you send will do yoeman service they are passed on to every man my cell-mate or I know."[7]
Alfred was devoted to the writings of John Draper and devoured everything within his reach on sociology, especially everything relating to the labor problems. He had theories of his own on many lines of public welfare, but no taint of anarchy or class hatred distorts his ideals of justice for all. He always advocates constructive rather than destructive measures.
Occasionally Alfred refers to the poets. He enjoys Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Lowell is an especial favorite; while delighting in the "Biglow Papers," he quotes with appreciation from Lowell's more serious poetry. The companionship of Thackeray, Dickens, and Scott brightened and mellowed many dark, hard hours for Alfred. "Sir Walter Scott's novels broke my taste for[Pg 69] trashy stuff," he writes. Naturally, Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" absorbed and thrilled him. "Shall I ever forget Jean Valjean, the galley slave; or Cosette? While reading the story I thought such a character as the Bishop impossible. I was mistaken." Of Charles Reade he says: "One cannot help loving Reade. He has such a dashing, rollicking style. And then he hardly ever wrote except to denounce some wrong or sham." Even in fiction his preference follows the trend of his burning love and pity for the desolate and oppressed. How he would have worshipped Tolstoi!
Complaint or criticism of the hardships of convict life forms small part of the thirty letters written me by Alfred while in prison. He takes this stand: "I ought not to complain because I brought this punishment upon myself." "I am almost glad if anyone does wrong to me because I feel that it helps balance my account for the wrongs I have done others." Shall we never escape from that terrible idea of the moral necessity of expiation, even at the cost of another?
Nevertheless, Alfred feels the hardships he endures and knows how to present them. And he[Pg 70] is not "speaking for the gallery" but to his one friend when he writes:
"Try to imagine yourself working all day on a stool, not allowed to stand even when your work can be better done that way. If you hear a noise you must not look up. You are within two feet of a companion but you must not speak. You sit on your stool all day long and work. Nothing but work. Outside my mind was a pleasure to me, in here it is a torture. It seems as if the minutes were hours, the hours days, the days centuries. A man in prison is supposed to be a machine. So long as he does ten hours' work a day—don't smile, don't talk, don't look up from his work, does work enough to suit the contractors and does it well and obeys the long number of unwritten rules he is all right. The trouble with the convicts is that they can't get it out of their heads that they are human beings and not machines. The present system may be good statesmanship. It is bad Christianity. But I doubt if it is good statesmanship to maintain a system that makes so many men kill themselves, go crazy, or if they do get out of the Shadow alive go out hating the State and their fellowmen. As a convict said to me, 'It's funny that in this age[Pg 71] of enlightenment they have not found out that to brutalize a man will never reform him. I have not been led to reform by prison life. It has made me more bitter at times than I thought I ever could be. One cannot live in a prison without seeing and hearing things to make one's blood boil....'
"Times come to me here when it seems as if I could not stand the strain any longer. Then again, even in this horrid old shop I have some very happy times, thinking of your friendship and building castles in the air. My favorite air castle is built on the hope that when my time is out I can get into a printing office and in time work up to be an editor. And perhaps do a little something to help the poor and to aid the cause of progress. Shall I succeed in my dream? Do we ever realize our ideals?"
"I wonder if ever a sculptor wrought
Till the cold stone warmed to his ardent heart;
Or if ever a painter with light and shade
The dream of his inmost heart portrayed."
"I did have doubts as to whether Spring was really here till the violets came in your letter. Now I am no longer an unbeliever. I am afraid[Pg 72] that I love all beautiful things too much for my own comfort. If a convict cares for beauty that sensitiveness can only give him pain while in prison. I love music and at times I have feelings that it seems to me can only be expressed through music; and I hope I shall be able to take piano lessons some time."
I discovered later that there was a strain of the old Welsh minstrel in Alfred's blood, but small prospect there was at that time of his ever realizing the hope of studying music. For all this while the boy was steadily breaking down under the strain of convict life, the "nothing but work" on a stool for ten hours a day on the shoe contract. Physical exhaustion was evident in the handwriting of the shorter letters in which he tells me of nature's revolt against the prison diet, and how night after night he "dreams of things to eat." "I sometimes believe I am really starving to death," he writes. But the trouble was not so much the prison food as that the boy was ill.
I went to see him at about this time and was startled by the gaunt and famished face, the appeal of the hungry eyes that looked into mine. I felt as if starvation had thrust its fangs into my[Pg 73] own body, and all through the night, whether dreaming or awake, that horror held me. Fortunately: for well I knew there would be no rest for me until forces were set in motion to bring about a change for the better in Alfred.
In the general routine of prison life, if the prison doctor pronounces a convict able to work the convict must either work or be punished until he consents to work; or——? In the case of Alfred or in any case I should not presume to assign individual responsibility, but as soon as the case was laid before the warden Alfred was given change of work and put on special diet with most favorable results as to health.
Alfred's imprisonment lasted about two years after I first met him, this break in health occurring in the second year. As the day of release drew near his hopes flamed high, breaking into words in his last letter.
"Next month I shall be a free man! Think of it! A free man. Free to do everything that is right, free to walk where I please on God's green earth, free to breathe the pure air, and to help the cause of social progress instead of retarding it as I have done."
Now, I had in Chicago a Heaven-sent friend[Pg 74] whose heart and hand were always open to the needs of my prisoners, indeed to the needs of all humanity. This friend was a Welsh preacher. He called upon me in Chicago one November afternoon when I had just returned from a visit to the penitentiary. I was tingling with interest in the Welsh prisoner whom I had met for the first time the evening before. Sure of my listener's sympathy I gave myself free rein in relating the impression that Alfred made upon me. I felt as if I had clasped the hand of Providence itself—and had I not?—when my friend said:
"Your Welsh boy is a fellow countryman of mine. If you will send him to me when released I think I can open a way for him." This prospect of a good start in freedom was invaluable to Alfred, giving courage for endurance and a moral incentive for the rest of his prison term.
Every man when released from prison in my State is given a return ticket to the place from which he was sent, ten dollars in cash, and a suit of clothing. These suits are convict-made, and while not distinctive to the ordinary observer, they are instantly recognizable to the police all over the State. Half-worn suits I had no difficulty in obtaining through my own circle of[Pg 75] friends. So when Alfred's day of freedom came a good outfit of business clothing was awaiting him and before evening no outward trace of his convict experience remained.
According to previous arrangement Alfred went directly to the Welsh preacher. This minister was more than true to his promise, for he entertained the boy at his own home over night, then sent him up to a small school settlement in an adjoining State where employment and a home for the winter had been secured, the employer knowing Alfred's story.
And there for the first time in his life Alfred had some of the right good times that seem the natural birthright of youth in America. Here is his own account:
"I had a splendid time Thanksgiving. All the valley assembled in the little chapel, every one bringing baskets of things to eat. There were chickens, geese and the never-forgotten turkey, pies of every variety of good things known to mortal man. In the evening we boys and girls filled two sleighs full of ourselves and went for a sleigh-ride. You could have heard our laughing and singing two miles off. We came back to the school house where apples, nuts, and candy were[Pg 76] passed round, and bed time that night was twelve o'clock."
It was not the good times that counted so much to Alfred as the chance for education. He began school at once, and outside of school hours he worked hard, not only for his board but picking up odd jobs in the neighborhood by which he could earn money for personal expenses. He carried in his vest pocket lists of words to be memorized while working, and still wished "that one did not have to sleep but could study all night." The moral influences were all healthful as could be. The people among whom he lived were industrious, intelligent, and high-minded. Among his studies that winter was a course in Shakespeare, and the whole mental atmosphere was most stimulating. Within a few months a chance to work in a printing-office was eagerly accepted and it really seemed as if some of his dreams might come true. But while the waves on the surface of life were sparkling, beneath was the perilous undertow of disease. Symptoms of tuberculosis appeared, work in the printing-office had to be abandoned after a few weeks, and Alfred's doctor advised him to work his way toward the South before cold weather set in; as[Pg 77] another severe Northern winter would probably be fatal. After consultation with his friends this course was decided upon; and, confident in the faith that he could surely find transient work with farmers along the line, he fared forth toward the South, little dreaming of the test of moral fibre and good resolutions that lay before him. The child had sought refuge from destitution in criminal life from which his soul had early revolted; but the man was now to encounter the desperate struggle of manhood for a foothold in honest living.
For the first month all went fairly well, then began hard luck both in small towns and the farming country.
"The farmers have suffered two bad seasons; there seems to be no money, and there's hardly a farm unmortgaged," he wrote me, and then: "When I had used the last penny of my earnings I went without food for one day, when hunger getting the best of me, I sold some of my things. After that I got a weeks work and was two dollars ahead. I aimed for St. Louis, one hundred miles away and walked the whole distance. What a walk it was! I never passed a town without trying for work. The poverty through there[Pg 78] is amazing. I stuck to my determination not to beg. I must confess that I never had greater temptation to go back to my old life; and I think if I can conquer temptation as I did that day when I was so hungry I need have no fears for the future.
"I reached St. Louis with five cents in my pocket. For three days I walked the streets of the City trying to get work but without success. I scanned the papers for advertisements of men wanted, but for every place there were countless applicants. My heart hurt me as I walked the streets to see men and women suffering for the bare necessaries of existence. The third night I slept on the stone steps of a Baptist Church. Then I answered an advertisement for an extra gang of men to be shipped out to work on railroad construction somewhere in Arkansas. A curious crew it was all through; half the men were tramps who had no intention of working, several were well-dressed men who could find nothing else to do, some were railroad men who had worked at nothing else. When one of the brakesmen found where we were bound for he said, 'That place! You'll all be in the hospital or dead, in two months.'
[Pg 79]
"The second evening we stopped at the little town where we now are. The work is terrible, owing to the swamps and heat. Out of the twenty five who started only eight are left. Yesterday I fainted overcome by the heat, but if it kills me I shall stick to the work until I find something better."
The work did not kill Alfred, but malarial fever soon turned the workmen's quarters into a sort of camp hospital where Alfred, while unable to work, developed a talent for nursing those who were helpless. His letters at this time were filled with accounts of sickness and the needs of the sick. He had never asked me for money; it seemed to be almost a point of honor among my prison friends not to ask me for money; but "if you could send me something to get lemons for some of the boys who haven't a cent" was his one appeal; to which I gladly responded.
Better days were on the way, however. Cooler weather was at hand, and during the winter Alfred found in a lumber mill regular employment, interrupted occasionally by brief illnesses. On the whole, the next year was one of prosperity. Life had resolved itself into the simple problem of personal independence, and with a right good[Pg 80] will Alfred took hold of the proposition, determined to make himself valuable to his employer. That he accomplished this I have evidence in a note of unqualified recommendation from his employer.
When the family with whom he had boarded for a year were about to leave town he was offered the chance to buy their small cottage for two hundred and fifty dollars, on monthly payments; and by securing a man and his wife as tenants he was able to do this.
"At last, I am in my own house," he writes me. "I went out on the piazza to-day and looked over the valley with a feeling of pride that I was under my own roof. I have reserved the pleasant front room for myself, and I have spent three evenings putting up shelves and ornamenting them and trying to make the room look pretty. I shall get some nice mouldings down at the mill to make frames for the pictures you sent me. And I'm going to have a little garden and raise some vegetables."
But the agreeable sense of ownership of a home and pleasure in the formation of social relations were invaded by haunting memories of the past. The brighter possibilities opened to his fancy[Pg 81] seemed but to emphasize his sense of isolation. Outward conditions could not alter his own personality or obliterate his experiences. It was a dark hour in which he wrote:
"How wretched it all is, this tangled web of my life with its suffering, its sin and its retribution. It is with me still. I can see myself now standing inside the door of my prison cell, looking up to the little loop-hole of a window across the corridor, trying to catch a glimpse of the blue heavens or of a star, longing for pure air and sunshine, longing for freedom....
"Strong as is my love for woman, much as I long for someone to share my life, I don't see how I can ever ask any woman to take into her life half of that blackened and crime-stained page of my past. I must try to find happiness in helping others."
But nature was too much for Alfred. Not many months later he tells me that he is going to be married and that his sweetheart, a young widow, "is kind and motherly. When I told her all of my past she said, 'And so you were afraid I would think the less of you? Not a bit. It only hurts me to think of all you have been through.'"
[Pg 82]
The happy letters following this marriage give evidence that the tie of affection was strong between the two. Here we have a glimpse of the early married days:
"I have been making new steps to our house, putting fancy wood work on the porch and preparing to paint both the inside and the outside of the house next month."—Alfred was night-watch at the lumber mill.—"It is four o'clock in the afternoon; I am writing by an open window where I can look out and see my wife's flowers in the garden. I can look across the valley to the ridge of trees beyond, while the breeze comes in bringing the scent of the pines. Out in the kitchen I can hear my wife singing as she makes some cake for our supper. But my old ambition to own a printing office has not left me. I am still looking forward to that."
Just here I should like to say: "And they lived happy ever after." But life is not a fairy-story; to many it seems but a crucible through which the soul is passed. But the vicissitudes that followed in Alfred's few remaining years were those of the common lot. In almost every letter there were indications of failing health, causing frequent loss of time in work. Three years after[Pg 83] his marriage, in the joy of fatherhood, Alfred writes me of the baby, of his cunning ways and general dearness; and of what he did when arrayed in some little things I had sent him. Then, when the child was a year old came an anxious letter telling of Baby Alfred's illness, and then:
"My Dear Friend:
"My baby is dead. He died last night.
"Alfred."
This tearing of the heart-strings was a new kind of suffering, more acute than any caused by personal hardship. Wrapped in grief he writes me: "To think of those words, 'My baby's grave.' I knew I loved him dearly, but how dearly I did not know until he was taken away. It isn't the same world since he died. Poor little dear! The day after he was taken sick he looked up in my face and crowed to me and clapped his little hands and called me 'da-da,' for the last time. Oh! my God! how it hurts me. It seems at times as though my heart must break....
"Since the baby died night watching at the lumber mill has become torture to me. In the long hours of the night my baby's face comes [Pg 84]before me with such vividness that it is anguish to think of it."
The end of it all was not far off; from the long illness that followed Alfred did not recover, though working when able to stand; the wife, too, had an illness, and the need of earnings was imperative. Alfred writes despairingly of his unfulfilled dreams, and adds: "I seem to have succeeded only in reforming myself," but even in the last pencilled scrawl he still clings to the hope of being able to work again.
I can think of Alfred only as a good soldier through the battle of life. As a child, fighting desperately for mere existence, defeated morally for a brief period by defective social conditions; later depleted physically through the inhumanity of the prison-contract system; then drawing one long breath of happiness and freedom through the kindness of the Welsh preacher; but only to plunge into battle with adverse economic conditions; and all this time striving constantly against the most relentless of foes, the disease which finally overcame him. His was, indeed, a valiant spirit.
Of those who may study this picture of Alfred's life will it be the "habitual criminals" who will[Pg 85] claim the likeness as their own, or will the home-making, tender-hearted men and women feel the thrill of kinship?
Truly Alfred was one with all loving hearts who are striving upward, whether in prison or in palace.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Alfred never entered private houses.
[7] Mrs. Burnett's charming little story, "Editha's Burglar," went the rounds among the burglars in the prison till it was worn to shreds.