If it has not stopped your heart at
once--if your brain has not immediately collapsed under the shock--you
will think of suicide. But, perhaps, before you can find means or
resolution to seek that escape, you will become conscious, in the
background of your mind, of a stirring of that almost ineradicable thing
that we call hope. You cannot quite bring yourself to believe that your
entire earthly future is to be passed in a prison cell. Some event will
occur, some beneficent freak of destiny, some earthquake or lightning
bolt, some national revolution or catastrophe, some belated sense of
humanity in your brother man, some new law repealing the impious cruelty
of the old law, that will break your bars before the end can come. You
cannot believe that you will actually live and die in jail.
Thus you are tided over your first hours and days, and with each new day
that you survive the chances of your surviving altogether increase. By
and by, you fall into the prison routine, and your existence becomes
mechanical and automatic. There will be occasional flamings-out of rage
and despair, but they pass, and become progressively more infrequent.
You have slipped down into a merely animal stratum of existence; you
live to-day because you lived yesterday, and you do not forecast
to-morrow. Perhaps you learn to assuage and deceive the hunger of your
immortal soul by forcing your attention upon the petty ripple of daily
events and duties, until you present, to the outsider, the appearance of
a commonplace, non-tragic person, bearing no noticeable scars of the
crime which society perpetrated on you.
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