1931
IT
WAS in Burma, a
sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting
over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned
cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each
cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank
bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting
at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the
condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.
One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a
Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a
thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for his body, rather like the
moustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall Indian warders were guarding him
and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by with rifles and
fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his
handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides.
They crowded very close about him, with their hands always on him in a careful,
caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there.
It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the
water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as
though he hardly noticed what was happening.
Eight o’clock struck and a bugle call, desolately
thin in the wet air, floated from the distant barracks. The superintendent of
the jail, who was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily prodding the
gravel with his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with
a grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice. “For God’s sake hurry up,
Francis,” he said irritably. “The man ought to have been dead by this time.
Aren’t you ready yet?”
Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white
drill suit and gold spectacles, waved his black hand. “Yes sir, yes sir,” he
bubbled. “All iss satisfactorily prepared. The hangman iss waiting. We shall
proceed.”
“Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can’t get
their breakfast till this job’s over.”
We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on
either side of the prisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched
close against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at once pushing
and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed behind.
Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short without any
order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened—a dog, come goodness knows
whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley
of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding
so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half
pariah. For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it,
it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face.
Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.
“Who let that bloody brute in here?” said the
superintendent angrily. “Catch it, someone!”
A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily
after the dog, but it danced and gambolled just out of his reach, taking
everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian jailer picked up a handful of
gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the stones and came after
us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail walls. The prisoner, in the grasp of the
two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of the
hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog. Then we
put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog
still straining and whimpering.
It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the
bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with
his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who
never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place,
the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on
the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder,
he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
It is curious, but till that moment I had never
realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the
prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable
wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not
dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were
working—bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues
forming—all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing
when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a
second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain
still remembered, foresaw, reasoned—reasoned even about puddles. He and we
were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding
the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one
mind less, one world less.
The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the
main grounds of the prison, and overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a
brick erection like three sides of a shed, with planking on top, and above that
two beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The hangman, a grey-haired
convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his machine. He
greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Francis the two
warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed him
to the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman climbed
up and fixed the rope round the prisoner’s neck.
We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had
formed in a rough circle round the gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed,
the prisoner began crying out on his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of
“Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”, not urgent and fearful like a prayer or a cry for
help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog
answered the sound with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the gallows,
produced a small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down over the
prisoner’s face. But the sound, muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over
and over again: “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”
The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the
lever. Minutes seemed to pass. The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went
on and on, “Ram! Ram! Ram!” never faltering for an instant. The
superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with his
stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed number—fifty,
perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The Indians had gone grey
like bad coffee, and one or two of the bayonets were wavering. We looked at the
lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries—each cry another
second of life; the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get
it over, stop that abominable noise!
Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing
up his head he made a swift motion with his stick. “Chalo!” he shouted
almost fiercely.
There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The
prisoner had vanished, and the rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog,
and it galloped immediately to the back of the gallows; but when it got there it
stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a corner of the yard, where it
stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went round the gallows
to inspect the prisoner’s body. He was dangling with his toes pointed straight
downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.
The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked
the bare body; it oscillated, slightly. “He’s all right,” said the
superintendent. He backed out from under the gallows, and blew out a deep breath.
The moody look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He glanced at his
wrist-watch. “Eight minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morning,
thank God.”
The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog,
sobered and conscious of having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked
out of the gallows yard, past the condemned cells with their waiting prisoners,
into the big central yard of the prison. The convicts, under the command of
warders armed with lathis, were already receiving their breakfast. They squatted
in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders with buckets
marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly scene, after the
hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was done. One felt
an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began
chattering gaily.
The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the
way we had come, with a knowing smile: “Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant
the dead man), when he heard his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the
floor of his cell. From fright. Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you
not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwallah, two rupees eight annas.
Classy European style.”
Several people laughed—at what, nobody seemed certain.
Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking
garrulously. “Well, sir, all hass passed off with the utmost satisfactoriness.
It wass all finished—flick! like that. It iss not always so—oah, no! I have
known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull the
prisoner’s legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable!”
“Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,” said the
superintendent.
“Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory!
One man, I recall, clung to the bars of hiss cage when we went to take him out.
You will scarcely credit, sir, that it took six warders to dislodge him, three
pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. ‘My dear fellow,’ we said,
‘think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us!’ But no, he would
not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome!”
I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was
laughing. Even the superintendent grinned in a tolerant way. “You’d better
all come out and have a drink,” he said quite genially. “I’ve got a bottle
of whisky in the car. We could do with it.”
We went through the big double gates of the prison,
into the road. “Pulling at his legs!” exclaimed a Burmese magistrate
suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began laughing again. At that
moment Francis’s anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink
together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred
yards away.