# Broken Necks/Broken Necks

I stood on the corner that day adjusting certain important adjectives in my life. I had seen two men hanged and it was spring. How the wine ran through the little greedy half-dead swarming the streets. Yes, those endless, bobbing faces almost looked at each other, almost smiled into each other's eyes——insufferable and inhuman breach of democracy. But there was something immoral about the day. The music of dreams tugged at the endless shuffling feet. The music of desires——little starved and fearful things come out for a moment in the sun and wind——piped vainly for dancers. There was something vague and bewildered about the buildings and the people as if there were a great undying shout in the streets. What a panic this monotonous return of spring breeds among the little half-dead as they shuffle and bob along with a tingle in their heels and a blindness that comes suddenly into their eyes. For it is through the mists of greedy complacencies that the little half-dead are able to pick their steps with certainty and precision. Now comes this wine and this music and this disturbance as of a great undying shout sweeping the bristling shafts of stone, and the mists vanish for a moment. In the blindness which falls upon them is an undertow tugging at their feet.
I stood on the corner that day observing how in the spring the bodies of women were like the bodies of long, lithe animals prowling under orange and lavender, green and turquoise dresses, and how the men with their coats dangling across their arms were like hot beetles that had removed their shells. But as I watched the endless faces filled with half-startled and half-placid confusion, and as I noted what the poets call the gayety of spring in the hearts of men, there came to me out of the swarm and roar of the day the mockery which it is the duty of philosophers to hear. For I had seen two men hanged and had most properly come away a philosopher.
Where was he who might have been crawling along the treadmill of time, lighted today for another instant by the spring? The creature who had spat at the cross on the scaffold, whose perfect tusks had grinned out of the gloom above our heads an hour ago? Laughing in Hell, if death makes men wise. For Hell is a place of wise laughter. And the other one, who had died vomiting terror?
There was a group of us waiting patiently for the tall steel doors of the jail to open. Righteous men we were with stern, cold faces come to transact with proper dignity certain grave business in the interest of the little greedy half-dead who even here shuffled through the streets with the lie of spring in their heels. And after we had been admitted and our credentials cunningly examined, we were marched through barred corridors and told to enter a door and make ourselves comfortable inside. Within this door stretched the room which was to witness the hangings. It was a long and narrow room with towering walls. It could have been built only for one purpose——as a room in which to hang men. The grey plaster of its walls was unrelieved by any humanizing design. They formed, these walls, a geometrical monotone unbroken by windows or doors except the one through which we had entered. The floor was of stone.
Forty long benches such as picnickers use in groves, had been introduced into this vault of a room. They seemed puny wooden toys under the sweep and stretch of the towering, slot-like walls. We came walking slowly into the room. We were doctors, public officials, jail attendants and newspapermen. We sat down on the benches and faced the gallows.
The timber of the gallows reached from the stone floor to the dark, forgotten ceiling. Fifteen feet above the floor was a platform. On this platform the men who were to be hanged were to stand until a part of its floor which was on hinges swung back and dropped them. Then they would be left dangling from the ropes. These ropes hung now from a cross beam fifteen feet above the floor of the platform. They were two bright yellow manila ropes. Each ended in a noose the size of a man's head. We on the benches stared with uncomfortable eyes at these ropes. In the gloom our faces floated like little pale discs above the benches. The ends of cigars and cigarettes made tiny red spots in the darkness and above our heads little grey and violet parasols of smoke opened and vanished. They were eager and efficient ropes and they had personality. They be- came, when we had scrutinized them for a long space, the strange and attenuated furniture entirely suited to this room. About their slim and elegant stretch there was something monstrous suggested. Things which are sometimes seen in a fever assume the grotesque dimensions of these ropes.
People do not think in these places. They sit with their mouths somewhat parted and smoke cigars and nod politely to each other as they talk. They stare about them as do children in a strange house, noting this and observing that. Indeed, it was not till an hour later that I became a philosopher and found it necessary to adjust adjectives.
There were two men on the scaffold platform. Ore was a stout man with snow colored hair. He was well dressed but we noticed with grave smiles that he seemed unduly conscious of his freshly shined patent leather shoes. He kept moving them about and we watched them closely like so many cats in the dark might watch two bewildered mice. At length achieving a comparative equanimity under our gaze, he thrust his hands behind him and stood stiffly facing the ropes. There was nothing left to think of about him other than that he was fat. The other man was a jail-guard.
Then we noticed simultaneously a little box-like shack which stood against the plaster wall at the rear of the gallows platform, It was just large enough to accommodate a man. We remarked in stern, sophisticated whispers to each other that the man who sprung the trap under the feet of the men about to hang was hidden in this enclosure. For a space we stared at a small circular window in the gallows shack, diverted by banal speculation. How did this man feel who actually did the thing which killed two men? As we stared a face, vague and dark, appeared in the little window and then vanished. We were content, and here and there in the gloom matches were struck and the faces of men lighting cigars remained in glowing prints upon the dark air.
Suddenly, as if greatly ahead of time, men started entering the room from the single door at the side of the gallows. Three public officials walked first. Behind them walked two priests in white and purple surplices. Between the two priests was a young man with a colorless face. He was in his shirt sleeves and without a collar. He looked as if he had been interrupted washing dishes. Following these were several jail-guards. We did not count their number. Behind the guards walked two priests in white and purple surplices. Between them walked the second man. For the first man without a collar who walked between the two priests we had no eyes. There was about him a lack of something which made him akin to us on the benches. He stopped and wobbled and his head rolled and from his lips issued a moan.
"Oh, my Lord Jesus Christ," he said.
His lips as he walked were peeled back in the manner of aman suffering from nausea. We did not look long at him. But the other——we stared and watched and forgot to puff on our cigars. He was a man with gaunt features and the face of an unbarbered Cesar, lined like the wing of a bat. He had a lean and muscular neck and he walked high-shouldered like an Egyptian. To the drooping lines of his mouth and chin clung a dark, curling covering of hair like the beard on the paintings of the adolescent Christ. He walked with his jaw thrust forward, lean and hollow jaws like the jaws of a starving monk. His eyes, round and black, nestled deep in his head, black and burning like the eyes of a voodoo priest.
We watched this man and moved about on our benches. We knew his name and the deeds he had done in the world. He had moved among the little greedy half-dead with altogether curious inspirations. At night he had flattened himself against dark alley walls and waited with a gun in his hand for men to approach him, and he had gone prowling after them like a stoical coyote crept into the city out of the darkness beyond. Thus he had grown rich and careless and taken to darting through the streets by day as he had done by night. In the sun there came into his heart a joyous hate that had misguided him. It caused him finally to stand upon a street corner shouting and shooting into the swarm of things about him until the street grew lonely and strangely rid of all sounds but the whoop of his voice and the little bark of his gun. It was very sad, for the little heaped figures that lay strewn in the emptied street might have been our wives and our mothers. Eventually a tall red-faced man bristling with gold buttons, pounced upon him from the rear and held him as he continued to shout and wave a useless gun toward the high roofs of the crowded buildings.
Here he was walking up the slim wooden stairs that led to the gallows platform and here he was standing under the looped rope that dangled at his ear and beside another man who continued to moan, "My Lord Jesus Christ, forgive me. Forgive us all." But we did not look at this one. The platform was now crowded with men, but we did not look at them. They came forward with long black straps and proceeded to bind the man who was moaning. Then a priest came forward and stood beside the man who was moaning and rested an ivory crucifix upon his lips and opened a book under his rolling eyes. But our eyes, held as by some vast thing about to happen, that will any minute happen, remained upon the gaunt, unbarbered face with its Christ-like beard, with the mystic snarl in its eyes, of the man who stood under the other rope. An inexplicable fascination held our eyes upon him. And under our unblinking stares he grew and grew and became lopsided and out of focus and the features of his face swam apart into the grimace of a man laughing.
Then our eyes cleared and we saw that his arms were strapped flat against his sides and his legs strapped tightly together at the ankles and the knees, and that a priest in a white and purple surplice, with a startled face, was offering an ivory crucifix for him to kiss. We watched him look at the crucifix, his eyes becoming filled with yellow lights; and watched his lips peel back and the teeth, exaggerated in their nakedness, shine in a grin. Suddenly he closed his mouth and spat at the crucifix. Beside him the man under the rope was moaning "Oh, my Creator. Let me see. Let me see." And his head wobbled toward the opened book the priest in front of him held to his eyes.
Of this we were conscious in an uninterested way. For a man had spat upon a crucifix and there was that in us which made us lower our heads and tremble and move uneasily. Other men stepped forward on the gallows platform and hung long white robes upon the two under the ropes. The robes fastened in a pucker about their necks and fell to the floor and were fastened in another pucker about their ankles. Then a man with unbelievable gestures slipped the rope over the head of the moaning one and drew the noose tight with unbelievable little jerks so that the knot fell under the man's ear.
"Oh, Lord Jesus Christ, my Jesus Christ, forgive me. Forgive us all," moaned the man, his face almost vanishing in the gloom.
About the neck of the other whom we were watching, as men watch something about to explode, the second rope was fixed and jerked into place. And then a voice shot from the platform. It came from the blur and flurry of men grouped behind the ropes.
"Have you anything to say," it inquired.
A cry answered from the one who was moaning. His words, blurred and buzzing, filled the room. "Oh, my Creator, my Creator," he sang. "I am going to my Creator."
And the man with the face that was lined like the wing of a bat remained silent, gazing with his glowing eyes down upon our heads. In his puckered white robe he loomed out of the gloom like some grotesque and stoical sage in masquerade, except for his teeth, which were bared and swimming in saliva. The faces above the ropes remained visible for several instants. Two men bearing white masks then approached them. The one who moaned was rolling his eyes up and down the towering, gloomy walls as if in frantic, helpless search. The other was staring down upon us in a strange, disinterested manner, his lips peeling back, his jaws thrusting forward. He drew a long breath and then vanished behind the white mask with a secret in his eyes.
Both men had disappeared. There were to be seen only two long white bundles curiously shapeless. We were silent. The moaning of the man who had kissed the crucifix suddenly resumed. It filled the room. It came louder and louder from the depths of the long white bundle, crawling over us and along the towering walls that had no windows. From the other white bundle came silence. The feet under it stared at us without movement. The moaning burst into words——"Oh, my Creator"——and was lost in a crash. The trap had banged down.
A great swaying howl rolled into the vault-like room. It swept like a curtain between us and the two white bundles that had shot through the trap. The two men were hanging. The howling came from the prisoners in the cells beyond in the jail, howling like the sustained cry of an army out of a wilderness. The two white bundles that were hanging, stirred. One of them turned slightly, with a certain idleness. The other began to expand and contract. A curious animation gradually took possession of it. Several minutes passed and the white bundles continued to bob and twitch. The one to the left which contained the man who had moaned began now to throb and quiver like a plucked and vibrating violin string. The rope above it hummed, filling the room with the whang of its monotone. The other bundle remained turning idly. A large group of men had risen from the benches in front. Several of them held black stethoscopes in their hands. They waited.
The rest of us stood to our feet. There was silence and the moments passed with our eyes unwavering. The two bundles seemed mysteriously wound up as if they would go on turning idly forever. Then they began to act as if some one were trying to blow them up from inside. Between the masks and the puckered tops of the white robes the necks of the two men hanging within the bundles became visible. Suddenly the turning ceased and the two bundles began to behave as if some one were jerking with an amazing violence on the ropes which supported them in mid air. They executed a frenzied and staccato jig.
The bundles hung motionless at the ends of the two ropes, limp, dead banners out of which the wind had died. A physician removing the stethoscope from his ears said something that ended with the words, "twelve minutes." A second physician repeated what he had said.
We crowded forward from the benches, gathering about the two figures which had dropped their white robes. They were no longer interesting. A certain fascination had gone out of them, out of the ropes, out of the tall, spectral timbers of the gallows. We passed them a few minutes later on our way out of the door. They were lying on two wheel cots. Their masks had been removed and their faces colored like stained glass watched us with mouths opened.
I had forgotten my hat. We had moved into the lobby of the jail and I hurried back after my hat. I stood for a moment gazing at the towering grey walls, the wood structure, the two strands of rope that dropped from the beam. They had been cut. There was no one in the room. I seized my hat, which was on a bench, and ran awkwardly after the men who had gone. Outside a man with a sharp beard said to me, shaking his head.
"Well, that boy died game, didn't he?"
The man was drawing deep breaths and looked about him bewilderedly in the sunny street.
I walked on until I came to the corner where the necessity of adjusting certain important adjectives in my life caused me to stop. Up and down the street swarmed the endless faces of the little greedy half-dead, lighted for a moment by the great sun. And having completed my philosophy, and because it was on this corner the gaunt and hollow-faced one had once stood, his heart swelled with a joyous hate, shouting at the buildings, I laughed and spat and eyed a woman whose body was like the body of a long, lithe animal prowling under a lavender and turquoise dress.