"CHRISTABEL"

Wairarapa Times-Age, 26 June 1939, Page 10

"CHRISTABEL"

Published by Special Arrangement.

Copyright.

By

PEARL BELLAIRS.

(Author of “Velvet and Steel,” “The Prisoner’s Sister,” etc.)

CHAPTER V. Perhaps it was the hope that hei appeal might succeed which kepi Christabel alive and sensitive when she would otherwise have fallen into an apathy of misery during the first months of her sentence. Grey passages, rows of locked cells, low oi- wretched faces about one; always the fear that one might do something contrary to the regulations that one had been told nothing about. Such as when they first put her into her cell, and she took down the furniture piled in the middle of it and placed it about as conveniently as she could. Two days later the wardress said roughly: '"Wot’s all this stuff doing put round the cell like this.” "Why?” Christabel was puzzled and frightened. "Don’t ‘why’ me!”. The woman went away, leaving Christabel to wonder what was going to happen. The wardress came back with a piece of chalk; and with an occasional order: ‘Get that out o’ the way!” and ‘Shift that!” she chalked on the floor the regulation pattern for the arrangement of cell furniture. Christabel put it all in order. Such incidents seemed enormous to her tortured mind. How was she to have known? Why couldn’t they tell her what the regulations were? Later the wardress adopted a more kindly manner. There was nothing very dreadful about the prison; only an extreme, unrelieved dreariness of time passing in an ugly, unhappy place. It was a shock, but not a very terrible one when the Court of Appeal found her sentence in accordance with the evidence, and her appeal was dismissed. She had come to believe in her own ill-luck.

As she settled down the heavy work in the laundry became an antidote to depression and her sense of injustice, and she sorted out the facts of the disaster.

Keith was dead, and it was no use blaming him. He had not taken it lightly; the last scene on the ship still gave her dreams from which she wakened at night in a sweat of horror. Craigie was a mere, miserable, terrified little crook. Henry Goring had behaved according to his ideas of right, and the promptings of his sister, a jealous, embittered old woman. But Hewitson —what excuse was there for Hewitson? She would not have fixed any of her bitterness on him however relentless he had conducted the case against her, if there had been the suggestion that he had hoped for personal gain in doing so. But that was intolerable!

Intolerable to think that he had butchered her to get the better of Ross Barnes, and had walked out of court a more successful man than ever. Whereas Christabel' oecame not even an individual, but part of an institution; not a name but a number; to pay and pay for his success with days and nights of mental anguish; with hour after hour of privation, monotony and shame, when every instant of selfconsciousness was an instant of despair.

In a way it was good for her to have that concrete grude against one man. All the bitterness that might otherwise have wrecked her character was concentrated on Hewitson. "Hard labour” consisted of work in the laundry. In the steamy, heated atmosphere she became very thin, and the work was heavy. But she did not break down, except once, during her first three months, at a time when she was most deeply depressed and could not sleep at night . . . The nights were worst. At five o’clock every evening she was locked in her cell, with nothing to do but to tell and retell the story of disasters; to cry with longing for a single friend, the understanding of one human companion. Or to lie in a dull aching apathy, because the ache was better than the pangs of active thought. Once in that intolerable silence broken only by the dripping of water in a cistern, and a snore from the next cell, she was haunted by an impulse to scream. She grew hot all over as she lay there, thinking: “I might scream. What if I were to scream?” And then she did scream, scream after scream, shattering the silence into a worse horror. Like an answer, somebody far away, some soul shut into some other cell, nerves snapped by the sound, screamed too. Then after that silence. Nothing but her own sobbing, agonised breaths. Nobody came. Darkness. Terror. Next day in the laundry she fell down in a state of collapse. She was allowed to lie in bod for three days. After which the prison doctor told her: “There's nothing wrong with you. This won’t do you any good. Back to work you go.” So she was sent back to the laundry; and she realised vaguely that it was for her own good. It was no use thinking. Her hands became red and thick from handling the hot, newly wrung cloths; and sometimes she would cool her stew at the cell window, which she could reach by standing on a chair, and skim the fat to rub her par-boiled fingers.

There were no mirrors in the cells. But there was one, carefully covered with wire netting in case anyone should try to break it in the bathroom. Three weeks after she went into prison Christabel noticed it; she looked at herself saw a frightened face peering back at hor through the netting; and for as much as six months never looked into it again. When she did—it was April by then, and there was a windy blue sky over the exercise yard—she hardly recognised her-

self. Her face was thin and so pale, her hair so straight and lank. She looked older; older; that was her first thought. She saw all her wrecked and wasted life gazing out of her own dark eyes, and turned away in despair. CHAPTER VI. But those were the early days. There comes an end of the ability to suffer. After some time there came a change. What saved her was a sense of her own innocence; the realisation of her own strength to endure. It was a gradual change, becoming conscious, perhaps, from the moment when she scattered some crumbs to the sparrows through the cell window, and saw a cross glittering on a distant church spire, and it seemed like a sign; when, with a sort of coincidence, the wardress who was sometimes so brutal smuggled a bar of chocolate in to her with her evening cocoa . . The same wardress went about one day with a red and swollen face. Her son had died in Canada. “I was ’ard on ’im!” said the wardress to Christabel, sniffing wretchedly and not caring who saw her. Perhaps she suddenly felt equal in guilt with the prisoners. “I was ’ard on that boy!” As Christabel grew more aware of the grey, half-muted life inside the prison, and learned the stories of the unfortunate, abnormal, or merely feeble-minded women about her, her sense of her own comparative integrity gave her strength. The havoc of her life was all without; there was no real ruin within; perhaps only a greater strength from suffering and experience.

She glimpsed her face in the mirror in passing one cold morning when, she was thinking of these things—surprised herself with a glimpse of beauty. After that she could look into the mirror with detached interest.

She saw there was a face no longer tortured-looking with nervous strain. A pale face with dark eyes alight under mild lids, and subtle shadows under the cheek bones. Someone who was quite different from the girl Christabel. A woman. A woman who, as she knew, knew everything and yet was still herself —because she was fundamentally innocent. At that time even the hatred of Hewitson which was to return so forcefully later fell away from her; but it was the only thing in her which was never wholly transformed. She singled him out as an object for contempt even when she felt compassion for the whole of the rest of the world . . .

She was a reliable worker, and during her last six months she was put to work in the prison hospital. The chaplain suggested to her that she should take up nursing again when she went out. The thought of going out troubled her more and more. She had assumed that she must sing, that she would find an occupation scrubbing workhouse floors, perhaps; she could not believe that she would ever take her place again in the world as an ordinary mid-dle-class woman. “You must make the effort,” said the chaplain. “But how shall I be able to conceal where I’ve been? How can I go back?” “Prisoners go back every day,” said the chaplain. “To their old homes, and their old occupations!” She was glad that at least there was no old home to face. Her mother had written to her regularly; but as Christabel “would understand,” it was too difficult for her to visit the prison. The Haye’s pitied Christabel, but were sorrier for themselves. There was the disgrace to be lived down. “Poor Christabel!” Mrs Haye would say, half tearfully. Mr Haye would tighten his lips, so that she was afraid to say more; it seemed indecent to have mentioned the matter. , The problem of what to do with Christabel when she came out had to be faced. His dignity would not allow Mr Haye to leave her to the care of the Prisoners’ Aid Society. It was usual for prisoners to be sent into the country to some women’s rest camp or convalescent home after their discharge. But Christabel wrote to her mother: “They want me to go to a home for three weeks, but I feel I can’t face it. Any more institutional life after coming out would drive me mad. If I may borrow the twenty-five pounds you offer to give me, I will look round for a job as soon as I come out.” A respectible boarding house was found for her to go to for three weeks in Richmond; and Mr Haye arranged for her mother to take her from the prison to Richmond in a hired car; after a fortnight’s rest she was to go to an employment agency recommended by the prison chaplain, and try to get a job. She had earned her thirty weeks remission of sentence with thirty months unquestioning labour and obedience. Her prison surroundings were so graven into her - nerves that they were strung almost to hysteria by .the though of seeing anything new. And yet on March 23, when she walked out to the waiting car with her mother, the strangeness of coming out was beyond all expectation. She wanted to weep. "How are you, mother?” How banal it sounded! “I’m very well, dear!” Mrs Haye’s voice trembled with nervousness. (To be Continued.)