These things I mention not
to excite the reader's pity nor yet his indignation; I mention them
because I do not know of any other way to indicate--it is no more than
indicating--the significance of the torture perpetrated under the
Directeur's direction in the case of the girl Lena. If incidentally it
throws light on the personality of the torturer I shall be gratified.
Lena's confinement in the _cabinot_--which dungeon I have already
attempted to describe but to whose filth and slime no words can begin to
do justice--was in this case solitary. Once a day, of an afternoon and
always at the time when all the men were upstairs after the second
promenade (which gave the writer of this history an exquisite chance to
see an atrocity at first-hand), Lena was taken out of the _cabinot_ by
three _plantons_ and permitted a half-hour promenade just outside the
door of the building, or in the same locality--delimited by barbed wire
on one side and the washing-shed on another--made famous by the scene of
inebriety above described. Punctually at the expiration of thirty minutes
she was shoved back into the _cabinot_ by the _plantons_. Every day for
sixteen days I saw her; noted the indestructible bravado of her gait and
carriage, the unchanging timbre of her terrible laughter in response to
the salutation of an inhabitant of The Enormous Room (for there were at
least six men who spoke to her daily, and took their _pain sec_ and their
_cabinot_ in punishment therefor with the pride of a soldier who takes
the _medaille militaire_ in recompense for his valour); noted the
increasing pallor of her flesh, watched the skin gradually assume a
distinct greenish tint (a greenishness which I cannot describe save that
it suggested putrefaction); heard the coughing to which she had always
been subject grow thicker and deeper till it doubled her up every few
minutes, creasing her body as you crease a piece of paper with your
thumb-nail, preparatory to tearing it in two--and I realised fully and
irrevocably and for perhaps the first time the meaning of civilization.
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