The first two weeks that he was in bed we could not induce him to get up to perform the most normal animal functions. But, as there did not seem to be anything the matter with him, he was finally forced to get up and go to the bathroom.
For more than two weeks we had plied him with questions--myself, the doctors, and all the convicts who knew different languages. He looked at us with his big, blue eyes, shaking his head as if he did not understand what we were talking about. We finally came to the conclusion that he either spoke some unknown language, or that maybe he was deaf and mute.
One day Richard, the young assistant, made him get up, but instead of walking, he crept on all fours to the bathroom. Then he got up like a human being and started drinking water from the faucet. Richard took him to task for his uncleanliness. He said to him: "Wash your face, you dirty pig!" And to the utter amazement of Richard, the supposed deaf mute turned round angrily and said, in perfect English: "You go to hell, will you!" A few weeks later he was taken to Matteawan.
Later I gathered from another Pole who had talked to him and succeeded in making him answer, that he had been a petty officer in the Russian navy, and that he had mutinied, and later had succeeded in escaping to America.
He had hit upon the idea of feigning insanity in order to foil the vigilant Russian secret service agents, who would be on the lookout for him upon his release from the Island; he feared that they would create an opportunity to "shanghai" him on board a Russian ship, and he knew that they would hang him if he ever was returned to the fatherland. He had been sentenced to sixty days on the Island for vagrancy.
Protestant clergymen, Catholic priests, Rabbis, Sisters of Mercy, missionaries and even a Theosophist preacher, visit the prison and the hospital regularly. Saturday afternoon is a very busy time for the "sky pilots."
One "sky pilot" comes only during the lunch hour and, walking to the busy table, invariably asks: "Well, boys, how goes it?" He has never been known to change his query in years--and that is the only service he has ever done for the souls of the convicts.
A tall, thin, spectacled, Protestant missionary devotes a great deal of his time to what he calls "saving souls from eternal damnation"; his way of doing this mysterious thing is by leaving tracts on our beds. They contain startling headlines, such, for instance, as this: "Be with Jesus. He is your only pal!"