“Aren’t you a little deaf still?” I asked, to ease the passion I felt of intolerable pity.

“Yes,” he replied, “on this side, where I fell in the chapel.  I fell on my ear, you know, and I must have burst the drum of it, or injured it in some way, for all through the winter it has ached and it often bleeds a little.”

“But they could give you some cotton wool or something to put in it?” I said.

He smiled a poor wan smile: 

“If you think one dare disturb a doctor or a warder for an earache, you don’t know much about a prison; you would pay for it.  Why, Frank, however ill I was now,” and he lowered his voice to a whisper and glanced about him as if fearing to be overheard, “however ill I was I would not think of sending for the doctor.  Not think of it,” he said in an awestruck voice.  “I have learned prison ways.”

“I should rebel,” I cried; “why do you let it break the spirit?”

“You would soon be broken, if you rebelled, here.  Besides it is all incidental to the System.  The System!  No one outside knows what that means.  It is an old story, I’m afraid, the story of man’s cruelty to man.”

“I think I can promise you,” I said, “that the System will be altered a little.  You shall have books and things to write with, and you shall not be harassed every moment by punishment.”

“Take care,” he cried in a spasm of dread, putting his hand on mine, “take care, they may punish me much worse.  You don’t know what they can do.”  I grew hot with indignation.

“Don’t say anything, please, of what I have said to you.  Promise me, you won’t say anything.  Promise me.  I never complained, I didn’t.”  His excitement was a revelation.

“All right,” I replied, to soothe him.

“No, but promise me, seriously,” he repeated.  “You must promise me.  Think, you have my confidence, it is private what I have said.”  He was evidently frightened out of self-control.

“All right,” I said, “I will not tell; but I’ll get the facts from the others and not from you.”

“Oh, Frank,” he said, “you don’t know what they do.  There is a punishment here more terrible than the rack.”  And he whispered to me with white sidelong eyes:  “They can drive you mad in a week, Frank."[2]

“Mad!” I exclaimed, thinking I must have misunderstood him; though he was white and trembling.

“What about the warders?” I asked again, to change the subject, for I began to feel that I had supped full on horrors.

“Some of them are kind,” he sighed.  “The one that brought me in here is so kind to me.  I should like to do something for him, when I get out.  He’s quite human.  He does not mind talking to me and explaining things; but some of them at Wandsworth were brutes....  I will not think of them again.  I have sewn those pages up and you must never ask me to open them again:  I dare not open them,” he cried pitifully.