IT WAS a dark autumn night.The old banker was walking up and down his study and remembering how, fifteen years before, he had given a party one autumn evening.There had been many clever men there, and there had been interesting conversations.Among other things they had talked of capital punishment.The majority of the guests, among whom were many journalists and intellectual men, disapproved of the death penalty.They considered that form of punishment out of date, immoral, and unsuitable for Christian States.In the opinion of some of them the death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.
"I don't agree with you," said their host the banker."I have not tried either the death penalty or imprisonment for life, but if one may judge _a priori_, the death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life.Capital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.Which executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?""Both are equally immoral," observed one of the guests, "for they both have the same object -- to take away life.The State is not God.It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to."Among the guests was a young lawyer, a young man of five-and-twenty.When he was asked his opinion, he said:
"The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral, but if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life, I would certainly choose the second.To live anyhow is better than not at all."A lively discussion arose.The banker, who was younger and more nervous in those days, was suddenly carried away by excitement;he struck the table with his fist and shouted at the young man:
"It's not true! I'll bet you two millions you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years.""If you mean that in earnest," said the young man, "I'll take the bet, but I would stay not five but fifteen years.""Fifteen? Done!" cried the banker."Gentlemen, I stake two millions!""Agreed! You stake your millions and I stake my freedom!" said the young man.
And this wild, senseless bet was carried out! The banker, spoilt and frivolous, with millions beyond his reckoning, was delighted at the bet.At supper he made fun of the young man, and said:
"Think better of it, young man, while there is still time.To me two millions are a trifle, but you are losing three or four of the best years of your life.I say three or four, because you won't stay longer.Don't forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.The thought that you have the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole existence in prison.
I am sorry for you."
And now the banker, walking to and fro, remembered all this, and asked himself: "What was the object of that bet? What is the good of that man's losing fifteen years of his life and my throwing away two millions? Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than imprisonment for life? No, no.It was all nonsensical and meaningless.On my part it was the caprice of a pampered man, and on his part simple greed for money...."Then he remembered what followed that evening.It was decided that the young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest supervision in one of the lodges in the banker's garden.It was agreed that for fifteen years he should not be free to cross the threshold of the lodge, to see human beings, to hear the human voice, or to receive letters and newspapers.He was allowed to have a musical instrument and books, and was allowed to write letters, to drink wine, and to smoke.By the terms of the agreement, the only relations he could have with the outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object.He might have anything he wanted --books, music, wine, and so on -- in any quantity he desired by writing an order, but could only receive them through the window.The agreement provided for every detail and every trifle that would make his imprisonment strictly solitary, and bound the young man to stay there _exactly_ fifteen years, beginning from twelve o'clock of November 14, 1870, and ending at twelve o'clock of November 14, 1885.The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions, if only two minutes before the end, released the banker from the obligation to pay him two millions.
For the first year of his confinement, as far as one could judge from his brief notes, the prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and depression.The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day and night from his lodge.He refused wine and tobacco.Wine, he wrote, excites the desires, and desires are the worst foes of the prisoner; and besides, nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing no one.And tobacco spoilt the air of his room.In the first year the books he sent for were principally of a light character; novels with a complicated love plot, sensational and fantastic stories, and so on.
In the second year the piano was silent in the lodge, and the prisoner asked only for the classics.In the fifth year music was audible again, and the prisoner asked for wine.Those who watched him through the window said that all that year he spent doing nothing but eating and drinking and lying on his bed, frequently yawning and angrily talking to himself.He did not read books.
Sometimes at night he would sit down to write; he would spend hours writing, and in the morning tear up all that he had written.More than once he could be heard crying.
