Here were the steps supporting the tall steel gate, through which, in former days, I had seen many a poor devil pass; it was now others' turn to commiserate, or to jeer, the poor devil that was myself. There was no delay--we seemed to be awaited; and in the next minute I had felt what it is to be locked into a prison. I was behind bars, and could not get out at my own will--nor at any one else's, for that matter; only at the impersonal fiat of the machine.
My marshal chatted and laughed a moment with the keeper, then gave me his buxom paw in farewell. I was led through stone passages, past rows of barred cells from which peered visages of fellow prisoners, incurious and preoccupied, or truculent and reckless--men under indictment and without bail, convicts making appeal, and culprits jailed for minor offenses. Such men were to be my comrades for the future. Some were out in the corridors, pacing up and down or chatting with friends; for the laws of the Tombs are unsearchable.
It is a unique place, a Devil's Antechamber, where almost anything except what is decent and orderly may happen. It is not so much a prison or penitentiary as a human pound, where every variety of waif and stray turns up and sojourns for a while; murderers, pickpockets, political scapegoats, confidence men, old professionals, first-time offenders, even suspects afterwards to be proved innocent. There is nothing that I know of to prevent thorough-going convicts from getting in here permanently; the Tombs is of catholic hospitality. But they do not properly belong here; it is but their halfway house--the antechamber.
And discrimination must be observed in classifying the inmates; no one here likes to be regarded as beyond hope of bettering or escaping from his restricted condition. He wears his own clothes, for one thing--and no small thing; he is not known by a number; it is not, I believe, en regle to club him into insensibility at will and with impunity, or to starve him to death, or so much as to hang him up by the wrists in a dark cell. The guards or keepers do not go about visibly armed with revolvers or rifles; talking and smoking are not prohibited; the grotesque assemblage is let out into the corridors occasionally, where they shamble up and down and exchange observations and confidences; and they have an hour outdoors in the stone paved, high-walled yard.