Part 16

I went early, not knowing at what hour the case might come up, and; although there were already many persons seated on the wooden forms, I looked carefully through both of the court-rooms without seeing those in whom my interest lay. Finding a vacant seat in the inner room, I sat there, watching intently the changing groups at the bar. They were made up of the commonest criminals of the town, and it was rare that a novice appeared to disturb the atmosphere of perfect naturalness. Law-breakers they were without question; the magistrate knew them as well as the police, and frequently he spoke to them by familiar names, reminding them of earlier warnings and threatening them with severer penalties for the future. It was a sort of clearing-house, where a certain residuum of habitual criminals was dealt with by a doctrine of averages in an effort to regulate and control the crime inevitable in a great city.

Sitting beside me on the form was a young girl, plainly dressed, with an air of perfect neatness. Her gloved hands lay folded in her lap and in one of them she held a purse. Her mackintosh of dark material was unbuttoned and thrown open, with the cape falling loosely over her arms. It was the trimness of her hair and a certain trig simplicity in her hat which struck me first, and, when she spoke, the tone and manner were in keeping with her quietness of dress.

“Will you tell me, please, what time it is?” she asked, and, having learned the hour, “What are you up for?” she continued, abruptly.

There was nothing about her which had in the least prepared me for the question, and I floundered about in an explanation that I was there merely out of interest in a case which I expected to come up in the course of the morning.

She smiled wearily at that, regarding me with eyes which asked whether I knew how young I was and how dreary that sort of thing made her feel. I was afraid that I had cut short the conversation and was delighted when she continued, quite simply:

“I’m up for shop-lifting. It was at Walker’s, and it was the hardest luck, for I had everything well concealed. But they suspected me, and, when they brought me here, the matron searched me and soon found the goods. And there I was, red-handed! Now I’m trying to think up some story, but the judge knows me and he warned me well last time.”

It was charming then, for we fell to talking as though we had known each other long. Her small gray eyes that looked straight into mine were as frank and innocent as a child’s. There was little beauty but an entire composure in the lines of her face, heightened by a natural pallor very becoming to her. Her features betrayed no nervousness, and one saw the change of feeling only in her eyes and in a subtle quality in her smile which was expressive and sometimes sweet.

We were two children, who had met by chance, and, sitting there in the dingy light of a station-house court-room, we were presently unaware of anything but the fact that we had a great deal to tell each other. I told her of the mechanic and the girl, and she half believed me, and, in turn, began to tell me of herself. There was no system in her story, only a simple sequence of spontaneity that charmed me. I had but to listen and watch her inscrutable face and ask questions where my dull intuitions were at fault. In the foreground was the incident of shop-lifting, and running from that was a chain of events which led back inevitably into the distant perspective of memory. She had never an air of giving me her confidence, rather of speaking freely as man to man.

It was bad to be caught at shop-lifting, and the more annoying because she had so often carried it off with success. At the best, shop-lifting was a wretched business, entailing much anxiety both in getting and disposing of the goods. But there was the stubborn fact that one must live. Of course she had worked as a shop-girl earning $3.50 a week. And here she began to count up on her fingers the items of bare subsistence with their cost, and the smile with which she concluded was touched with the question, “When you have spent your all upon mere living, what have you left to live on?” There had been something of this idea in her protest to her employer, and he met her frankly with the assurance that, if she found it impossible to live on her wages, it would give him pleasure to introduce her to a “gentleman friend.” Other employments which were open to her were no better in point of wages; some of them were not so good, but they were all alike in offering relief by the way suggested at the department store.

“I’m not what you’d call a ‘good girl,’” she said, “only, you know, I’d so much rather die than do that.”

And the revulsion of the child’s nature against what to her was this infinite terror led her to tell me of her bringing up. Her memory did not go back to the beginning of her stay in a convent near Dublin, where her parents placed her to be taught. Life had begun for her in the peaceful routine of the sisterhood. All her deepest impressions were got there, and, when as a child of twelve, she came out to emigrate with her people to America, she was instantly in a new world on leaving the convent walls. It had been an almost overwhelming discovery to her to find that the standards of goodness and purity which prevailed within were apparently almost unknown outside the convent. It staggered her intelligence as a child, and, during a long experience of earning her living as a girl, she had slowly constructed a philosophy of life which was drawn from the facts of hard struggle with a world which seemed bent upon compassing her ruin.

She spoke reverently of the teachings of the sisters, and of the influence of their devoted work, “But you know,” she added, “I cannot believe any longer that only those are Christians who are members of the Catholic Church, and that all others will be lost. The world would be too horrible, if that were true. To be a Christian must be simply to follow Christ.”

It was from this revery that we were roused by the loud calling of her name. I watched her walk to the bar and stand there with perfect composure, while the clerk read the indictment, and the witnesses were mechanically sworn, and the girl was heard, and the magistrate gave his verdict.

“Minnie,” he said, in closing, “I told you, when you were here last, that the next time you came up, you should go to the Bridewell, and now to the Bridewell you shall go. Minnie, why can’t a smart girl like you be decent?”

Her profile was toward me, and I saw a faint smile play for a moment on the clear lines of her face.

“Your honor,” she replied, “it is a little late now, but when I began to earn my living I wanted nothing so much as the chance to be decent.”

Meanwhile, two reporters were quickly sketching her where she stood—a singularly well-poised figure—while others were noting the salient facts of the case; for it was a good “story,” having already attracted attention. With wide notoriety as a thief, she went to prison that day, and, when she came out, a not too hospitable world was the more on its guard against her. An officer accompanied her from the room, but she did not forget to nod to me and smile as she passed out.

Engrossed as I had been in Minnie, I had not noticed the coming of the mechanic and the girl whose case had drawn me there. I saw them now when I looked around. The sight of the girl was perplexing at first, for she sat with another woman at the end of a neighboring form, and they looked so much alike that I could not distinguish the one who was there on trial. Crossing the passage, I asked leave to sit beside them. They drew up at once to make room for me, and I saw then that, the girl next me was the prisoner. The other was a twin sister, as she frankly told me, and the resemblance fully sustained her. I explained that I had come to the station-house because I happened to see the affair of a few nights before, and was anxious to find what course it would take in court. The girl agreed with me that the mechanic was in no way to blame.

“He never know’d that it was an officer that was draggin’ me down the steps, and out into the street. I never know’d it neither till I see his star under his coat. I thought he was crazy, and was goin’ to kill me like ‘Jack the Ripper.’” She was a girl in age, and obviously one of the most helpless of her order.

There is a common impression that such women are attracted to their ruin by vanity and a love of dress. You lose that idea among the wrecks who walk the city streets at night. Anything to flatter their vanity or to gratify their taste is the least likely of all possible experiences to most of them. It is a matter of keeping soul and body together. Some are dexterous pick-pockets, who make large hauls at times—not always, however, for themselves; most are ill-fed, ill-dressed slaves, who, when their tributes are paid, are penniless. Any degree of viciousness may be found among them, and you may find as well a high degree of the innocence of the unmoral, the sense of morality completely lost in the instinct of self-preservation.

The girl beside me was like fragile porcelain, her thin lips and nostrils and delicate skin all marred by a pasty, white unwholesomeness. There was a hectic flush in her sister’s face and her eyes were ablaze with disease. We were talking about the case and drifted naturally into further talk about themselves. They were orphans and had long supported themselves by working in a tobacco factory, but there their health had failed, and when they were well enough to work again, they found employment in a laundry. To supplement the “sweating” wages, they had taken to street-walking, and then their end was near. But they spoke as frankly of this last as a “business” as of the earlier occupations, and you saw that, to their thinking, it was only a degree more complete a sale of soul and body.

“But business is poor,” the ill sister was saying, presently, “and I ain’t very well, which I wouldn’t mind, but there’s my baby, and, if anything happens to me, who’s goin’ to take care of him? You don’t think I’ve got consumption, do you?” And she turned upon me a face with the cheeks sunk to the bone and the eyes dilating with the fire which was burning out her life.

When our case came up, it went through without a hitch. The officer told his story with a pompousness that was due to wounded pride and he dwelt over-much upon his efforts to make his assailant understand from the first that he himself was a member of the force. The girl was simplicity and frankness itself; not an effort to conceal her character, but a straightforwardness about the officer’s brutal roughness which threw it into strong relief. But the young mechanic was the best. He was new to courts as he abundantly proved, and when his turn came to testify, he stood licking his dry lips like one with stage-fright. Speech came haltingly from him at the first, while his face flushed, but the sense of injustice urged him on to a perfectly clear statement of how, while “doing the town,” he had seen this girl ill-treated and had struck the man without knowing that he was an officer.

I knew that all was well, for I saw a smile pass vaguely now and then over the magistrate’s face, and when he spoke, the girl was dismissed with a fine and the young mechanic with a friendly warning against “doing the town,” while the officer was held up in open court for reproof and told that, if he knew no better how to handle his prisoners, he was ignorant of the first principles of the special service to which he had been assigned.

It is only a few steps from the station-house to the heart of the business section of the city. I passed through it now, as I often did, for the sake of the feeling that it gives one of the reach and strength of the industrial forces which are centred there. Here is no sense of failure or of loss, but of energy and skill trained to high efficiency in the co-operation of productive powers. Men are there producing for all mankind, and in spite of the present waste of human life, I cannot doubt that, with the problems of production so widely solved, the genius of the race is turning surely to the subtler questions of a fairer distribution.

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● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected. ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected. ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book. ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (italics).